Description
The bacon explosion has just met its maker. This Thanksgiving Bacon Explosion is a regular bacon and turkey bacon weave loaded with sausage, stuffing and mashed potatoes, rolled up and smoked then topped with a cranberry bourbon glaze. Create it from scratch or load it up with your favorite Thanksgiving leftovers!
Ingredients
Scale
Meat used:
- 1 lb Turkey Bacon (I usually hate turkey bacon but in this application it works. Plus it’s a little more structurally sounds and since we are stuffing this bad boy to the gills we’ll need that)
- 1 lb of regular Bacon
- 1 lb Turkey Sausage
- 1 lb Sausage (You can use whatever kind you like; we used Italian sausage)
Other ingredients:
- 1 Package Stuffing (we used Stove Top Turkey flavored stuffing but any kind would work)
- About 2 Potatoes worth of mashed potatoes (Do’em up however you like. Extra creamy, super lumpy it don’t matta. We added just a little cream cheese and milk to ours.)
For the cranberry glaze:
- 16 oz Cranberries (Fresh or Frozen)
- 16 oz apple juice
- 8 oz Whiskey (We used Fireball because we are super fun)
- 2 cups sugar
- Seasoning: Your seasoning of choice. We used 2 Tbsp powdered sage, 2 tsp dried parsley, 2 tsp black pepper, 2 tsp salt (You can use The BBQ Brother's All Purpose BBQ Rub if you wanted to)
Wood Used: Hickory
Grill Temperature: ~225 F, indirect heat
Meat Temperature:165 F
Smoke time: ~3 hours
Instructions
- First, make your bacon weave as usual. We alternated between the turkey bacon and regular bacon, and while it’s not necessary, I think it helped keep it all together.
- After it’s all together, sprinkle on some of your rub.
- Next, you’ll want to mix your two sausages together and spread it out onto your weave. There are tons of tricks for the best way to get it on the weave but after doing this a few times just slapping it on and spreading it out with your hands has worked best for us. Once it’s all spread out, sprinkle with more of your rub, and since this is kind of bland, feel free to go liberal with the rub.
- Next, you’ll want to make your stuffing, nothing crazy just follow what the box says. This will create a bit of a buffer between our sausage and mashed potatoes so that we don’t get soggy potatoes.
- Same thing as the stuffing and sausage, just spread the mashed potatoes in a thin layer and season it up. We added some pepper and garlic powder at this stage.
- So now you want to roll this bad boy up, tucking it and keeping it as tight as you can (now would be a time to rope in one of those family members or friends that you’re going to be feeding).
- Once you’ve got it rolled up, set it seam side down. You may have to add some additional bacon to the ends to keep it from leaking if you stuffed it too much (guilty) but that won’t affect your end result.
- Stick some toothpicks in it to hold on any loose pieces of bacon while smoking. You’ll want to set your smoker to 225 and smoke your explosion on indirect heat for about 3 hours or internal temperature reaches 165. We used hickory chips for this smoke. Now while that’s going on you can make your cranberry glaze/sauce.
- Just dump all the glaze ingredients into a pot on medium heat. You’ll want to stir to combine and coat everything in sugar. You’ll want to keep an eye on it as the cranberries burst and release their liquids and get everything nice and gooey. The sauce will be done in about 25 minutes.
- Once your explosion is done, carefully remove it from the smoker let it rest for about 15 minutes then serve it up with a nice dollop of cranberry sauce right on top.
Notes
See post notes for step by step images of creating bacon explosion!
