This past weekend was Super Bowl Sunday. I was having a couple of the guys over so I decided to try this interesting recipe from the BBQAddicts website. I won’t repost their recipe, but will describe what I did and the things I did, for better or worse, that was different than the recipe.

First, my ingredients. For some of the ingredients, I used the best (imho) stuff, for other ingredients it was just what was convenient. I used my local (and famous!) Gorilla BBQ spice rub. If you recognize the name, Gorilla BBQ was on Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives television show. The sausage was home ground pork butt and seasoned using this recipe from TheSpicySausage. The barbeque sauce was Cattlemens St. Louis and the bacon, was Hormels.

I laid out the bacon in a grid pattern as instructed.

I then cooked the bacon for the filling

I used the barbeque rub to coat the bacon, then spread sausage onto the bacon weave.

Then carefully rolling the pork into a tube shape first, then carefully wrapping the bacon around it, tucking the edges as I went, I ended up with this.

After cooking it with low, indirect heat for a while it looked like this.

I glazed it with barbeque sauce and let the sugars caramelize and voila!

It’s not that big. It’s about 2 to 2.5 inches across. So it’s not as fattening as it looks. If you eat three or four three-quarter inch slices you’re looking at about as many calories as a bacon burger.

People who ate it liked it (except for one friend who can’t take anything spicy). I thought the bacon outside was too crispy and although I like bacon crunch for breakfast, in this recipe, softer bacon may have been better for taste and texture.

Lessons learned. This is what I’ll do if I ever make this again. The original recipe calls for a smoker. I think that low bbq is not a sufficient substitute for a smoker unless you can really get the barbeque to hold at a very low temperature. Thick sliced bacon. Thick sliced is not great for everything, but in this recipe would be far superior and easier to control than the thin sliced I used. Ironically, I had a half pack of thick apple wood smoked bacon in the fridge. Take the meat out before the bacon gets too crispy. Make the barbeque sauce from scratch. I made a big batch last year and it was really good. The flavors were complex and there was a depth that I didn’t taste in the barbeque sauce I used this time. Make it a bit bigger. More pork to bacon ratio would have been a good thing.

All in all it was decent. I think if I make the changes above it’d go from decent to pretty awesome.