In his ingenious cookbook, Smoking Meat, Jeff Phillips cooks practically anything in a smoker. Excerpted from Smoking Meat: What do you get when you roll out a breakfast sausage, stuff it full of cheese and other goodies, roll it back up, wrap it with a weave of bacon, then smoke it so it is nice and crispy on the outside and oozing with moist goodness on the inside? Well, one of the best darn things you’ll ever eat in your whole life, that’s what! I highly recommend making two of these, as the first one will go so quick you won’t even know what happened to it.

See Also

Smoked Duck Breast with Wine-Butter Sauce

Bacon Wrapped Cheese-Stuffed Jalapenos

Cookbook Review: Smoking Meat

Ingredients

• 13 strips thinly sliced bacon
• 1 pound plain or hot ground breakfast sausage
• ½ cup shredded pepper Jack cheese
• 1 jalapeno pepper, finely chopped
• ½ cup shredded cheddar cheese
• 8 to 10 baby spinach leaves

• Prep Time: 45 minutes
• Cook Time: 180 minutes

• Total Time: 225 minutes
• Yield: Serves 6

Preparation

1. Recommended wood for smoking: hickory, cherry or pecan.
2. Bacon weave: This isn't difficult, but it may take a little practice to figure out exactly how to make it work.
3. Lay seven strips of the bacon in a horizontal fashion on an 18x18-inch piece of waxed paper. Remove strips two, four, and six. Lay a single strip of bacon along the edge, across rows one, three, five, and seven. This is column one. Replace rows two, four, and six on top of column one.

1. Next, fold back rows one, three, five, and seven, and lay a second column of bacon (column two) right beside the column one and across rows two, four, and six. Replace rows one, three, five, and seven across column two.
2. Continue this pattern of weaving until you have completed a seven-by-six bacon weave.
3. Place the sausage into a 1-gallon Ziploc bag. Zip the top of the bag, then snip a bit off of the two bottom corners to let air escape. Using a rolling pin, flatten the sausage evenly so you have a perfectly formed square. Use a sharp knife or scissors to cut the bag, leaving the sausage square on the bottom.
4. Flip the sausage square onto an 18x18-inch piece of waxed paper. Remove the plastic. Layer the top of the sausage with the pepper Jack, jalapeno, cheddar and spinach leaves.
5. Roll the sausage up, with the filling inside, using the waxed paper to help you. Once the sausage is completely rolled up, place the roll along the bottom row of the bacon weave, centering it. Use the waxed paper that the bacon weave is lying on to help you roll the bacon around the stuffed sausage roll. Leave the fatty on the counter while you set up your smoker.

1. Prepare your smoker for cooking at 225°F to 240°F. If you are using a gas, electric or a charcoal smoker, be sure to have enough wood chips or chunks to produce smoke for about two hours. Once the smoker is ready, carefully place the fatty directly on the smoker grate with the seam of the bacon weave facing down.
2. Smoke the fatty for three hours. Once it is done cooking, remove it from the smoker grate and let it rest for 15 minutes before slicing it into ½-inch medallions.
3. Eat the fatty slices for breakfast with eggs or on a burger or sandwich. Fatties even taste great on a plain piece of bread with a little barbecue sauce drizzled over the top.

Reprinted from Smoking Meat by Jeff Phillips, photography by Michelle Furbacher, Whitecap Books © 2012.