Dang I was trying to be quite

Thank you.

It's a bit tough to keep the temp down. With the firebox and stack vents closed the thermometers were only going down to about 250. 'Course they are located towards the top. I'm not sure what my bottom rack temps are running yet, couldn't find the oven rack thermometer to stick in.

If you'd been here I'll bet you'd be sitting in the chair next to me just as miserable as I am.

:spock:

In other words, you would have gorged yourself just as I did.

:shake:

take an asprin before going to bed
is thins the blood

Nice work Pastor. I like the upgrades. Particularly the cheese.

I had a couple of guys over tonight. Cut off a half inch slice from last nights leftovers and zapped in in the microwave for a minute then handed it to them. They were amazed and awed at what they tasted.

Dang, this is completely off my diet, but I'm drooling. Might have to fix this bad boy up once smoking season starts again. If I slice it into 1/2" slabs and freeze 'em, I think this could be a once an every 2 week treat.

Just think, if you went with the Atkins diet THIS could be what you eat for your diet.

:thumb:

I really don't need to lose much weight. Right now I'm 6'-0", 175 lbs. I was around 167 this summer, which is a better weight for me. But more than weight, my blood chemistry could use some help, so I try limit saturated fats and cholesterol. Atkins is just the opposite of what I need.

The images above fit nicely in the photography thread.

FOR a nation seeking unity, a recipe has swept the Internet that seems to unite conservatives and liberals, gun owners and foodies, carnivores and ... well, not vegetarians and health fanatics.

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Recipe: Bacon Explosion (January 28, 2009)

Don Ipock for The New York Times
Woven bacon has sausage on top, then some cooked bacon. More Photos »
Certainly not the vegetarians and health fanatics.

This recipe is the Bacon Explosion, modestly called by its inventors “the BBQ Sausage Recipe of all Recipes.” The instructions for constructing this massive torpedo-shaped amalgamation of two pounds of bacon woven through and around two pounds of sausage and slathered in barbecue sauce first appeared last month on the Web site of a team of Kansas City competition barbecuers. They say a diverse collection of well over 16,000 Web sites have linked to the recipe, celebrating, or sometimes scolding, its excessiveness. A fresh audience could be ready to discover it on Super Bowl Sunday.

Where once homegrown recipes were disseminated in Ann Landers columns or Junior League cookbooks, new media have changed — and greatly accelerated — the path to popularity. Few recipes have cruised down this path as fast or as far as the Bacon Explosion, and this turns out to be no accident. One of its inventors works as an Internet marketer, and had a sophisticated understanding of how the latest tools of promotion could be applied to a four-pound roll of pork.

The Bacon Explosion was born shortly before Christmas in Roeland Park, Kan., in Jason Day’s kitchen. He and Aaron Chronister, who anchor a barbecue team called Burnt Finger BBQ, were discussing a challenge from a bacon lover they received on their Twitter text-messaging service: What could the barbecuers do with bacon?

At the same time, Mr. Chronister wanted to get attention for their Web site, BBQAddicts.com. More traffic would bring in more advertising income, which they needed to fund a hobby that can cost thousands of dollars.

Mr. Day, a systems administrator who has been barbecuing since college, suggested doing something with a pile of sausage. “It’s a variation of what’s called a fattie in the barbecue community,” Mr. Day said. “But we took it to the extreme.”

He bought about $20 worth of bacon and Italian sausage from a local meat market. As it lay on the counter, he thought of weaving strips of raw bacon into a mat. The two spackled the bacon mat with a layer of sausage, covered that with a crunchy layer of cooked bacon, and rolled it up tight.

They then stuck the roll — containing at least 5,000 calories and 500 grams of fat — in the Good-One Open Range backyard smoker that they use for practice. (In competitions, they use a custom-built smoker designed by the third member of the team, Bryant Gish, who was not present at the creation of the Bacon Explosion.)

Mr. Day said his wife laughed the whole time. “She’s very supportive of my hobby,” he said.

The two men posted their adventure on their Web site two days before Christmas. On Christmas Day, traffic on the site spiked to more than 27,000 visitors.

Mr. Chronister explained that the Bacon Explosion “got so much traction on the Web because it seems so over the top.” But Mr. Chronister, an Internet marketer from Kansas City, Mo., did what he could to help it along. He first used Twitter to send short text messages about the recipe to his 1,200 Twitter followers, many of them fellow Internet marketers with extensive social networks. He also posted links on social networking sites. “I used a lot of my connections to get it out there and to push it,” he said.

The Bacon Explosion posting has since been viewed about 390,000 times. It first found a following among barbecue fans, but quickly spread to sites run by outdoor enthusiasts, off-roaders and hunters. (Several proposed venison-sausage versions.) It also got mentions on the Web site of Air America, the liberal radio network, and National Review, the conservative magazine. Jonah Goldberg at NationalReview.com wrote, “There must be a reason one reader after another sends me this every couple hours.” Conservatives4palin.com linked, too.

So did regular people. A man from Wooster, Ohio, wrote that friends had served it at a bon voyage party before his 10-day trip to Israel, where he expected bacon to be in short supply. “It wasn’t planned as a send-off for me to Israel, but with all of the pork involved it sure seemed like it,” he wrote.

About 30 people sent in pictures of their Explosions. One sent a video of the log catching fire on a grill.

Mr. Day said that whether it is cooked in an oven or in a smoker, the rendered fat from the bacon keeps the sausage juicy. But in the smoker, he said, the smoke heightens the flavor of the meats.

Nick Pummell, a barbecue hobbyist in Las Vegas, learned of the recipe from Mr. Chronister’s Twittering. He made his first Explosion on Christmas Day, when he and a group of friends also had a more traditional turkey. “This was kind of the dessert part,” he said. “You need to call 911 after you are done. It was awesome.”

Mr. Chronister said the main propellant behind the Bacon Explosion’s spread was a Web service called StumbleUpon, which steers Web users toward content they are likely to find interesting. Readers tell the service about their professional interests or hobbies, and it serves up sites to match them. More than 7 million people worldwide use the service in an attempt to duplicate serendipity, the company says.

Mr. Chronister intended to send the post to StumbleUpon, but one of his readers beat him to it. It appeared on the front page of StumbleUpon for three days, which further increased traffic.

Mr. Chronister also littered his site with icons for Digg, Del.icio.us and other sites in which readers vote on posts or Web pages they like, helping to spread the word. “Alright this is going on Digg,” a commenter wrote minutes after the Explosion was posted. “Already there,” someone else answered.

Some have claimed that the Bacon Explosion is derivative. A writer known as the Headless Blogger posted a similar roll of sausage and bacon in mid-December. Mr. Chronister and Mr. Day do not claim to have invented the concept.

But they do vigorously defend their method. When one commenter dared to suggest that the two hours in the smoker could be slashed to a mere 30 minutes if the roll was first cooked in a microwave oven, Mr. Chronister snapped back. “Microwave??? Seriously? First, the proteins in the meats will bind around 140 degrees, so putting it on the smoker after that is pointless as it won’t absorb any smoke flavor,” he responded on his site. “This requires patience and some attention. It’s not McDonald’s.”

Bacon belly bomb is a big hit

By TIM ENGLE

The Kansas City Star


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DON IPOCK
The Bacon Explosion is great served on a biscuit, says co-creator Jason Day.
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Never underestimate the power of bacon — or the Internet.

Two local barbecue-lovin’ guys have found themselves the toast of the bacon world thanks to a recipe calling for just two main ingredients: bacon (two pounds of it) and Italian sausage (two pounds of that). The sausage is wrapped in a basket-weaved blanket of bacon, and for good measure there’s even more bacon inside. Sweet KC-style sauce, too.

Then you smoke it. In a backyard smoker.
Aaron Chronister and Jason Day, who compete in barbecue circles as Burnt Finger BBQ, call this meat missile “Bacon Explosion.” And explode it has: first online (it helps that Chronister is an Internet marketer), then Wednesday on the cover of The New York Times’ food section (headline: “Take Bacon. Add Sausage. Blog”), then online some more.

Anyone doubt that Kansas City is the barbecue capital of the world?

All told, Chronister and Day say the Bacon Explosion recipe on their site, www.bbqaddicts.com., has attracted 510,000 page views since it was posted just before Christmas; 90,000 alone on Wednesday.
Now, thanks to the Times story, the bacon buds are bound for New York, where they’ll smoke their sausage Friday morning in Times Square. That’ll be on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” show. Then they’ll head south to Tampa, Fla., to do some Super Bowl tailgating Sunday on another Fox channel. Two book publishers e-mailed Wednesday and want to talk.

This whole thing started when a Web site called Bacon Today asked Chronister and Day if they had any bacon barbecue recipes. “The longer I thought about it,” Day wrote on bbqaddicts.com, “the more I wanted to step it up a notch and clog a few arteries for those guys.”
Chronister, 32, of Kansas City, and Day, 27, of Roeland Park, admit they’re not the first foodies to combine the two pork products in a barbecue recipe. But you have to give ’em credit for a catchy name.

More than that, you have to give them credit for knowing how to exploit the Internet. Chronister’s brilliant move was posting on Twitter, a site that sends out short Web-based text messages. His 1,200 Twitter “followers” — mostly other Internet marketers and “social network influencers” — took it from there.

Some of them thumbs-upped the Bacon Explosion post on a site called StumbleUpon, which suggests Web pages based on a user’s interests. The recipe became so hot there it went to the site’s front page.

Other sites, such as Digg and Del.icio.us, also helped the recipe go viral. There’s a Bacon Explosion fan page on Facebook. On YouTube, you can watch gas grills catching on fire when the Bacon Explosion log almost literally explodes. (Hint: Cooking in a smoker, with indirect heat, is the recommended method. Dripping bacon grease and an open flame are a dangerous combination.)
Chronister and Day do not claim, by the way, that Bacon Explosion is health food. Just one little sandwich — a couple of 1/4 -inch to 1/2 -inch rounds of meat on a buttermilk biscuit — “sits heavy,” Day says. The entire meat log contains something like 5,000 calories and 500 grams of fat.

One of the first comments posted in response to the recipe: “They should make drive-through angioplasty. It would make this much easier.”

Amy Winn of the Kansas City Barbeque Society hadn’t heard of the Bacon Explosion until The Star called her, but she’d like to try it.

“They’re good marketers,” Winn says of Chronister and Day. “Doesn’t necessarily mean they’re good cooks at this point.”
Still, considering that they and third team member Bryant Gish competed for the first time last fall, they’re doing well: Their brisket finished fifth at the American Royal. They’re looking forward to a contest with an “other” category to enter the Bacon Explosion in.
“No one else is as good at making it,” Chronister says. “There’s kind of a technique to doing it right without it falling apart.”
Chronister and Day have decided to get a sign made up for when they’re cooking in contests: CREATORS OF BACON EXPLOSION. And they’re planning to build up their Web site — it’s mostly recipes and a blog now — and maybe get some advertisers. A product called Bacon Salt just contacted them.

“We struck a chord with bacon,” Day says modestly
.
<hr class="infobox-hr-separator"> Creating a ‘Bacon Explosion’
You need 2 pounds of thick-cut sliced bacon, 2 pounds of Italian sausage, 3 tablespoons barbecue rub and 3/4 cup barbecue sauce. Day and Chronister use their barbecue team’s homemade rub and sauce.First, build a latticework of 10 slices of bacon, like on top of a pie. The strips should be tightly woven. Cook remaining bacon until crisp.
Sprinkle bacon weave with 1 tablespoon of rub.
Spread sausage on top of the bacon lattice, pressing to outer edges.
Crumble fried bacon on top of the sausage. Drizzle with 1/2 cup sauce and sprinkle with tablespoon of the rub.
Separate front edge of sausage layer from the bacon weave and roll away from you. Press sausage roll to remove air pockets and pinch together seams and ends.
Roll the sausage toward you, this time with the bacon weave, until completely wrapped. Turn it seam-side down. The roll should be 2-3 inches thick. Sprinkle with remaining rub.

Cook in a smoker at 225 degrees for about 2 1/2 hours, or until internal temperature reaches 165 degrees. Glaze with more sauce when done. Day and Chronister don’t recommend cooking this in an oven because, unless the meat is lifted out of the pan, it will get very greasy.
For step-by-step photos, go to www.bbqaddicts.com.
<hr>To reach Tim Engle, call 816-234-4779 or send e-mail to [email protected].