Bacon Explosion

This caterpillar of meat, known as Bacon Explosion or Bacon Bomb, is just pork meatloaf wrapped in bacon.  Regular beef meatloaf is so tame compared to the Bacon Explosion.

I wanted to make devils on horseback for Christmas dinner but when my son Ming asked if I've heard of bacon weave before (I hadn't), I googled it and that led me to Bacon Explosion, a long roll of pork sausage meat with fried bacon bits covered with a mat of weaved bacon, bbqued until it's smokey and crisp and glazed with a sweet sauce. The original Explosion was created by the bloggers here and was said to contain at least 5000 calories. I have made a less sinful version, cutting back on the amount of bacon and fat used but still, do proceed with caution.

Because bacon is expensive here, I didn't want to use any more bacon than necessary so I didn't have crispy bacon in the meat filling. We can't get fresh sausage meat here and I had to make my own. I had a packet of chorizo sausages from Australia (thanks, Liz) that was close to the used-by date so they were chopped up, fried and mixed into the sausage meat for extra flavor.

The Bacon Explosion for Christmas dinner was so good that it went quickly, leaving me scavenging just the bacon bits and dried cranberries I had used for garnish. I intended to post the recipe after making another Explosion this weekend but after several requests for the recipe, including from W in Canada who I just spoke to this evening, I am posting the recipe today for those who want to make one for New Year's Eve dinner. I am waiting for a photo of the cut Explosion taken by a friend (I was too busy to take photos) and I'll upload it later.

If fresh pork sausage meat is available where you are, you can use that instead of making your own. You can also substitute the chorizo with bacon, pepperoni or whatever you like. In the original recipe, the Bacon Explosion is smoked-bbqued and glazed but I find it easier to cook it in the oven. I also don't like my bacon fully crisp so the oven is a better place to cook the roll.  If you want a glaze, just make your own or use bottled bbq sauce mixed with some honey or maple syrup. Serve the Bacon Explosion with a crisp salad and some mash and say hello to your triple chin.

Note: I made a second BE a week later and the result wasn't as good as the first one. I've thought about it and think these are the reasons:

1. The local chorizos were not as tasty or maybe it was because I used only 2 instead of 4 chorizos. Advice: Use tasty chorizos.
2. I got the bacon from the same supermarket but noticed that the bacon was in narrower strips and tasted different. Advice: Keep to good fresh thick-cut Aussie bacon.
3. I took the short cut of having the butcher mill-grind the pork for me but the mince was too coarse. Machine-ground pork is too pasty. Chopping by hand gives a fine mince that's just nice.
4. I didn't cook the roll until the bacon was browned enough because I needed the oven for baking bread. The BE should be baked until the bacon is browned and quite crispy.
5. I used Hunt's hickory bbq sauce to glaze and I think that really spoilt the taste. My advice is to skip the bbq sauce.


Weave the bacon strips on a piece of firm plastic. You can sprinkle some bbq seasoning or dry rub on the bacon mat if like. I didn't. 



It is easier to pat the sausage meat into a long log on a prepared tray and then slap the bacon mat on top than put the sausage meat on top of the bacon mat and roll.



Weave the bacon mat on a piece of plastic for easier lifting of the mat and slap the mat on the sausage roll. Tuck the ends under the roll.


Make sure the weaving is tidy and snug.

 



My Bacon Explosion
The sausage meat:
1.5 kg pork shoulder, with at least 20% fat
4 chorizo sausages (about 400 gm)
3/4 t salt (or reduce slightly)
3/4 T ground sage
3/4 t thyme
1/4 t ground ginger
1/2 t nutmeg
1/4 t white pepper
1/8 ts cayenne pepper
1/4 cup water or 1 egg, beaten
1 1/2 slices of day-old bread, cut into 1/2 cm cubes

For the bacon weave:
About 800 gm to 1 kg of thick-cut streaky bacon (do not use the thin-cut Danish bacon)

Optional: bbq seasoning/dry rub

1. Chop or coarse-grind the pork. Cut the chorizo into small pea-sized cubes and fry them in a frying pan without oil. Remove when the chorizo are golden brown. Cool.

2. Mix the fried chorizo and all the other sausage meat ingredients until well-blended, cover and leave in the fridge for at least half an hour to firm up.

3. Meanwhile, weave the bacon criss-cross into a mat. You'll need two or three large bacon mats. Arrange the bacon 'mats' on a baking tray lined with aluminium foil. You can sprinkle the bacon with your favorite bbq seasoning/dry rub for extra flavor.

4. Pat the sausage meat into a long roll on the weaved bacon. Roll the sausage with the weaved bacon mats firmly and snugly. Or, the easier way is to weave the bacon on a piece of plastic for support, lift the plastic up with the bacon mat and drape over the sausage roll. Re-arrange and tidy up the weave, making sure the bacon strips are woven closely. Tuck the edges under. Make sure the ends of the roll are covered and the seams of the mats are at the bottom on the tray. You can spread some bbq seasoning on the roll if like. Chill the roll in the fridge while the oven heats up.

5. Preheat oven at 200 C and put in the bacon roll. Bake 1 1/2 hours uncovered. Check on the roll now and then to make sure that it is not burnt. At the end of cooking, glaze with a bbq sauce if like.

Saltimbocca Alla Romano

Pork saltimbocca alla romano.

The photos aren't pretty (it was too dark) but this is a really really delicious dish! I can't believe I've lived this long and never eaten saltimbocca even though Italian food is one of my top 3 cuisines.

Yi brought some prociutto/parma ham back from Melbourne and they turned out very salty and the flavor was too heavy for my taste. Good prociutto should be smooth, delicately flavored, almost having a floral scent and not 'dead' salty. That's prociutto according to me but then I've never been to Italy. Talking of which, my fav prociutto is not from Italy but from Spain. It doesn't have to be jambon Iberico (which is really NOT over-rated; it really is great) but any serrano ham's excellent, I've found. Anyway, I checked the price label and sure enough, it had a Safeway logo. Never buy your ham from supermarkets, I've often told my kids. The regular sandwich ham is fine but for anything else, you must hit the delis. I love these delis in Melbourne and Brisbane.

Wey found that the Safeway prociutto tasted better cooked and we had some on a caesar salad but there was plenty more to go. Then I remembered a cookbook, Rome: Authentic Recipes Celebrating The Foods Of The World by Maureen B. Fant, which had a recipe for a prociutto-lined veal called saltimbocca alla romana, a Roman specialty. The prociutto flavored the meat with its saltiness and savory sweetness while the sage, butter and wine combination gave the meat a most wonderful flavor and aroma, so Italian I imagined I was somewhere in Tuscany. This is a perfect way to use up prociutto that's not good enough for eating plain. This dish is so simple to cook that NO ONE can go wrong with it.

Since veal can hardly be found here, I settled for pork loin. You can use a beef tenderloin or chicken too if pork is not your meat. I can see myself serving this as an appetiser next time I have a dinner party. I can see the saltimbocca rolled and cut, topped with a cube of crusty bread toasted in olive oil and garlic, elegantly served as canapes with toothpicks holding them together. And to cut the saltiness, some cubes of rock melon too. Ohhh. With a white wine and my family's high approval of the dish last night, I really felt la dolce vita, except for a little pain in my heart.

Pork/Veal/Chicken Saltimbocca
12 pieces meat escalopes of your choice
8-10 (more if your escalopes are large pieces) thinly sliced prociutto
12 or more fresh sage leaves
freshly ground black pepper
about 4 T plain flour
2 T unsalted butter
4 oz dry white wine

wooden toothpicks

1. Slice the meat into thin pieces of 1/4" or 1/2 cm thick and pound it with a meat mallet to tenderize.

2. Lay a piece of prociutto over the meat, trim to size with scissors and lay a piece or two of sage leaves on top of the prociutto, securing with a wooden toothpick. The leftover cut pieces of procuitto can be used the same way, just patch them together on the meat.

3. When ready to cook, melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a pan. Lightly coat the pieces of meat all over with the flour, shake off excess, and place 6 pieces of escalopes prociutto side down into the buttered pan. Cook over medium heat for 2 minutes, then turn over to cook another 4-5 minutes at low heat. You can grind some black pepper over now or later when the meat's on the plate. There's really no need to salt the meat because the prociutto will be salty enough. Remove the cooked saltimbocca onto a serving plate. Repeat with remaining escalopes.

4. Add the wine to the pan, increase the heat to medium high and deglaze the pan by loosening the brown bits with a ladle. Let the liquid evaporate into half the original amount and drizzle (because there's not much) it over the saltimbocca.

I served them with golden olive oil roasted potatoes but bread is good too.

Update: Lunchguy, a chef based in Bangkok,has some invaluable tips for cooking this dish. The prociutto can be sandwiched between two slices of meat (pls refer to comments for details) and he suggests seedless white grapes as garnishing, a perfect choice. I love!

Home-Made Sausage Patties

I've always wanted to make my own English muffins and pork sausages, mainly because they aren't easy to find here. While we can get frozen pork sausages (at prices 10 times the ordinary wiener sausages), I've never seen English muffins anywhere except for McDonald's. McD's Sausage McMuffin is the only item I like on their menu (yes, my family prefers Burger King burgers) and I do occasionally make my way there for one (ok, two) of these 'thigh-breakers'. McD's sausage patties in Malaysia are made of chicken but they taste like pork. Btw, did you know that an uproar by bloggers in Singapore against McD's replacement of the soft toy pig with a cupid toy for their current Chinese New Year offer of Chinese zodiac animals led to an apology last week by the burger chain and reinstatement of the pig toy? I wish everybody would just lighten up.

I don't have a meat grinder and sausage casings are only available in bulk from KL. I've been experimenting with making English muffins the whole week but both recipes that I tried failed and right now my poolish for the 3rd recipe is growing. I think this might be it. In the meantime, my ground pork can't wait, so I went ahead and made sausage patties, which turned out very well.

When it comes to sausages, chicken or beef or lamb just don't taste as good as pork. Pork fat is the perfect fat for sausages, being more neutral in flavor than chicken, lamb or beef fat. If you need to go kosher, then use chicken or beef or lamb. The sausages taste better if there's more fat but for health reasons, I use about 70% lean meat to 30% fat, which give good sausage patties but probably not sausages. Sausages will need more fat to make them moist and less coarse. The texture of the meat is up to you. For patties, I used a coarser-ground pork than I would if I made sausages. Since I don't have a meat grinder (a food processer would grind the meat too finely into a paste), I leave it to the butcher to grind the meat for me. Next time I would tell him to grind the meat finer because there were ungrounded chunks in the mince. I found the recipe for breakfast sausages here. Wey said the sausages were nearly as good as McD's, 'nearly' thrown in because he thinks my patties should have a little more salt. I am giving you the recipe based on my own try out which was about half the recipe in the link. Now if only I can make good English muffins I wouldn't need to get up early and get into town for McD's breakfasts before 11 a.m.


Breakfast Sausage Patties (makes 15 patties)
1.5 kg ground pork
3/4 T salt
3/4 T sage
3/4 t thyme
1/4 t ginger
1/2 t nutmeg
1/4 t white pepper
1/8 t cayenne pepper (omit if you don't like hot)
1/4 cup water

1. Mix everything together until very well blended. Test by frying a small thin patty and adjust the seasoning if necessary.

2. Divide the mixture into 15 balls, each about a fistful. Roll and pat each into a patty about 1 to 1.5 cm thick and place on a piece of greaseproof paper. Chill in the fridge to set.

3. Grease a skillet or pan and fry the patties for about 5 minutes each side, pressing the patties when you first place them in the pan to prevent the patties from growing thicker as they cook. If you press the patties after they are half-cooked, their juices will run out and the result will be dry patties. It's a good idea to make the patties thinner if you don't want to bother pressing them when you cook. Serve hot.

Parmesan Pork Chops

Parmesan Pork Chops



1/2 kg pork chops or pork loin
1 egg
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
2 tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese
1 cup dry breadcrumbs
salt and pepper

1. Cut chops or loin into 1 to 1.2 cm thick slices and tenderize with a meat mallet or cut criss-cross on both sides.
2. Mix the egg with the mustard, the cheese with the breadcrumbs.
3. Season chops with salt and pepper, then add egg mixture and mix well.
4. Coat chops with the breadcrumbs mixture and set in fridge.
5. Fry in hot oil. Good served with a tangy salad and mashed potatoes but not fries b/c that'll be too heavy and greasy altogether.

Tangy Tomato Salad

This is actually a bruschetta recipe but if you chop the ingredients like the tomatoes into bigger chunks its good as a salad.

4 ripe tomatoes, finely diced
1/4 cup fresh basil, cut into shreds
2 tablespoon finely chopped sun-dried tomatoes
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt

1. Mix everything together, cover and leave in fridge till ready to eat. Pour away the liquid.
2. Serve with toasted bread (or just eat as a salad).


Crusty bread such as ciabatta or French bread, sliced
Extra virgin olive oil
Grated parmesan cheese

1. Mix oil and cheese, spread onto bread.
2. Toast till golden.
3. Enjoy with some chardonnay.