Yesterday was my wife Corina’s birthday and I decided I wanted to do up something special for the dinner we were hosting. We had friends and family over for a potluck style dinner and I thought what better occasion then to try and cook up everyone’s favourite internet recipe sensation, the Bacon Explosion.

I pretty much followed the recipe as it was outlined on the site, but the final product definitely didn’t turn out quite as nice as I might have hoped, but it didn’t really take away from it being pretty tasty and generally well received.

I believe the first mistake I made was not getting thick cut bacon. I thought the bacon I had was reasonably thick, but wasn’t actually the thick cut kind. This was an issue as it seemed my bacon weave didn’t hold up very well to being placed on the BBQ. I didn’t have a chance to hit up a butcher this weekend, so I’ll definitely have to source some thicker bacon next go around.

I did discover a way to roll the sausage a little easier then they outline in the recipe.  Once you’re done seasoning your bacon weave, place a piece of tinfoil roughly the same size as the weave over top of it, then place the sausage onto the foil.  Then you can simply roll the sausage with the help of the foil instead of trying to do it by hand and making a big mess.

The second mistake I believe I made was preparing on the BBQ in a rush.  Friends and family started arriving earlier then expected and it didn’t quite get the slow cooked love it deserved.  I tried to cook it with indirect heat directly on the BBQ grill, but since the dinner hour fast approached I had to speed up the browning process and I kinda ruined the bacon weave by having to move it around on the grill.  As you can see below I had a bit of a jailbreak on the one side of the bacon weave.  So when cutting it I didn’t get nice clean slices, more piles of miscellaneous pork.  Either way it tasted delicious.  I figure next time I’ll use a BBQ tray or maybe just cook it with tinfoil underneath.

The one feedback I from people was that it wasn’t quite bacon-y enough and the taste was primarily sausage.  As I don’t(yet!) have a smoker, I figure that would make a big difference in the overall taste.  Plus with additional slow cooking time the bacon flavour probably would have seeped through a little better.