[Rhodes22-list] just in time for Super Bowl!

[michael meltzer]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/dining/281brex.html?_r=1
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/dining/281brex.html?_r=1&ref=dining>
&ref=dining

 

 

Woven bacon has sausage on top, then some cooked bacon. More
<http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/01/28/dining/0128-BACON_index.html>
Photos > 

Certainly not the vegetarians and health fanatics. 

This recipe is the Bacon Explosion
<http://www.bbqaddicts.com/blog/recipes/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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/super_bowl/i
ndex.html?inline=nyt-classifier>  Sunday. 

Where once homegrown recipes were disseminated in Ann Landers
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/ann_landers/in
dex.html?inline=nyt-per>  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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/christmas/in
dex.html?inline=nyt-classifier>  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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/twitter/index.html?in
line=nyt-org>  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 <http://www.thegood-one.com/index.php>  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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/text_messagi
ng/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>  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
<http://knightdiver.blogspot.com/2009/01/bacon-explosion-experience.html>
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 <http://www.headlessblogger.blogspot.com>  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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/mcdonalds_corporation
/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 's."