As people who know me are aware, I'm a big fan of bacon, so when I first encountered the bacon explosion, I had to try one. I immediately ordered one or more and then tried assembling them myself.
I was going to call this the segmented bacon explosion, but apparently the bacon explosion is really a fattie filled with bacon, and what I wanted to try was filling it with other breakfast foods commonly served along side sausage or bacon.
I've already tried making relatively low fat bacon explosions, with turkey bacon for example, and had reasonable luck, so I started with that. Actually, here's my ingredient list:
1 package turkey bacon
1 lb sausage (in this attempt, Bob Evans maple; it's lower in fat than the other brands I've tried)
1 jar Billy Bones BBQ dry rub (you won't need the whole thing)
6 eggs
2 breakfast sausage patties
3-6 French toast fragments
I started by laying out a sheet of wax paper and sprinkling some of the dry rub. Then I constructed a lattice of the turkey bacon (you can see how the real Bacon Explosion is constructed here) and rolled out the sausage until it made a pretty uniform blanket over the bacon.
The sausage patties and French toast fragments were left over from a previous meal, but if you don't have any or if you've only got waffles or something, no worries. I rolled tracks in the raw sausage with the patties so when I rolled the whole thing up I wouldn't have to worry about punching a whole through the meat wall, but you can just set some of the raw sausage aside and do a spackle job later.
Since I only wanted two compartments in my stuffed fattie, I could have used only one sausage pattie to make the partition, but I had hoped putting one at what was going to be the bottom would lend some structural support, since raw processed meat is more like a viscous fluid than any sort of load bearing rigid object.
Right. So, with one patty near one end to mark the bottom and one near the middle, I packed in all the French toast fragments I dared.
I found a bottle with the same diameter I wanted the fattie to be, a bit smaller than the sausage patties, and wrapped it in wax paper and laid it on the sausage blanket in the second partition. I then rolled it up as you would any other bacon explosion.
I tried pinching the sausage shut where I could, sealing the French toast end, and then stood it up on that end and removed the bottle. It slid out of the wax paper easily, but the paper stuck to the greasy blanket a little. I had to try twisting it down into a smaller-diameter roll before I could extract it, but eventually it came out.
Next came the hard part: filling the top compartment with scrambled eggs. You know how to make those up, so I'll skip to the bit where I poured them in and prayed and hoped that the compartment was watertight. A little of the eggs leaked out before I got everything plugged up or pinched off that I could find, but it didn't seem like very much, so into the oven it went for the T and t recommended by the BBQ Addicts. Seriously, if you don't know how hot or long to cook the thing, you should have followed my links to their site a long time ago; only your arteries will regret it.
The result was less than awesome. It was fine, actually, except that during baking, I lost the rest of the eggs. Just a puddle of scrambled egg on the bottom of my cookie sheet.
I've thought about what happened but I haven't made another attempt. I reckon I just couldn't get everything sealed up properly; as plastic as uncooked pork sausage is, it's just prone to delaminating from the bacon lattice while in the green state. Maybe if I'd set aside more sausage at the beginning I could have used it to path obvious or probable holes.
But, even failed experiments are successes of a different kind. I could have filled it up entirely with French toast and had no problem other than making sure I had maple syrup in the house. I could have laid down a layer of cheese and just coiled the thing up like a Yule log.
I'll get back to you on that.
I was going to call this the segmented bacon explosion, but apparently the bacon explosion is really a fattie filled with bacon, and what I wanted to try was filling it with other breakfast foods commonly served along side sausage or bacon.
I've already tried making relatively low fat bacon explosions, with turkey bacon for example, and had reasonable luck, so I started with that. Actually, here's my ingredient list:
1 package turkey bacon
1 lb sausage (in this attempt, Bob Evans maple; it's lower in fat than the other brands I've tried)
1 jar Billy Bones BBQ dry rub (you won't need the whole thing)
6 eggs
2 breakfast sausage patties
3-6 French toast fragments
The sausage patties and French toast fragments were left over from a previous meal, but if you don't have any or if you've only got waffles or something, no worries. I rolled tracks in the raw sausage with the patties so when I rolled the whole thing up I wouldn't have to worry about punching a whole through the meat wall, but you can just set some of the raw sausage aside and do a spackle job later.
Since I only wanted two compartments in my stuffed fattie, I could have used only one sausage pattie to make the partition, but I had hoped putting one at what was going to be the bottom would lend some structural support, since raw processed meat is more like a viscous fluid than any sort of load bearing rigid object.
Right. So, with one patty near one end to mark the bottom and one near the middle, I packed in all the French toast fragments I dared.
I found a bottle with the same diameter I wanted the fattie to be, a bit smaller than the sausage patties, and wrapped it in wax paper and laid it on the sausage blanket in the second partition. I then rolled it up as you would any other bacon explosion.
I tried pinching the sausage shut where I could, sealing the French toast end, and then stood it up on that end and removed the bottle. It slid out of the wax paper easily, but the paper stuck to the greasy blanket a little. I had to try twisting it down into a smaller-diameter roll before I could extract it, but eventually it came out.
Next came the hard part: filling the top compartment with scrambled eggs. You know how to make those up, so I'll skip to the bit where I poured them in and prayed and hoped that the compartment was watertight. A little of the eggs leaked out before I got everything plugged up or pinched off that I could find, but it didn't seem like very much, so into the oven it went for the T and t recommended by the BBQ Addicts. Seriously, if you don't know how hot or long to cook the thing, you should have followed my links to their site a long time ago; only your arteries will regret it.
The result was less than awesome. It was fine, actually, except that during baking, I lost the rest of the eggs. Just a puddle of scrambled egg on the bottom of my cookie sheet.
I've thought about what happened but I haven't made another attempt. I reckon I just couldn't get everything sealed up properly; as plastic as uncooked pork sausage is, it's just prone to delaminating from the bacon lattice while in the green state. Maybe if I'd set aside more sausage at the beginning I could have used it to path obvious or probable holes.
But, even failed experiments are successes of a different kind. I could have filled it up entirely with French toast and had no problem other than making sure I had maple syrup in the house. I could have laid down a layer of cheese and just coiled the thing up like a Yule log.
I'll get back to you on that.
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