The Bacon-ator

Since the first quarter of the year is almost over and Boy and I haven’t posted anything (we still haven’t even posted our Christmas ham Toas-Tite recipe or our last Toas-Tite Top Chef Improv recipe…oops…), we decided to go big for our first one back.

The inspiration for this Toas-Tite came from SmokingMeatForums.com.  The good folks over there are expert meat / cheese / fish / vegetable smokers.  If you can eat it, they can smoke it.

A while back, Smoking Meat Forums (SMF) introduced us to the “fatty“.  A fatty is generally a breakfast sausage (or 1 pound of breakfast sausage), rolled out into a flat layer with some kind of fabulous filling spread on top and then rolled up like a jelly roll and smoked.  It can be stuffed with peppers, cheese, other kinds of meat, or whatever else you can think of.  Fatties are about as varied as Toas-Tites.  For me, the creme de la creme fatty I will never forget is the fried potato and ham stuffed breakfast fatty from member Cowgirl at SMF.  At the time, bacon weaves were a relatively new concept for me and Cowgirl turned them into edible art with her fatty.

So let’s get down to business.  For this Toas-Tite, we decided to make an ode to a fatty.  Not exactly a traditional fatty, but sort of an inside out Toas-Tite version, complete with bacon weave.

The Bacon-ator Fatty Toas-Tite

Ingredients

• 10 slices of bacon (that’s right 10 – we used uncured thick sliced bacon from Wellshire Farms with 40% less fat…but clearly we weren’t really that worried about fat for this one)
• 1/4 pound of lean ground beef
• About 1/2 an ounce of cornbread
• Salt and pepper to taste

What We Did

1. To start off, we decided we wanted our Toas-Tite not to be wrapped in bread today but wrapped in a bacon weave.  So we made two weaves.  Each weave was made from 5 slices of bacon – 3 going horizontally and 2 vertically, alternating which slice of bacon is on top or underneath.
2. Then we prepped our sausage patties.  We mixed a dash of salt and a fair amount of pepper in with our ground beef.  Then we divided the quarter pound into two patties and cooked them briefly in a small skillet.  Pre-cooking your patties is the safest way to go to make sure your meat is cooked thoroughly.
3. Finally we prepped our last ingredient by cutting our slice of cornbread in half so it was about half an inch thick and maybe 1.5 to 2 inches in diameter.
   
4. Then it was time to assemble.  We layered one of our bacon weaves onto the bottom of the Toas-Tite grill, placed one sausage patty on top, the cornbread in the middle, the other patty on top of that, and then the final bacon weave.
   
5. We trimmed the extra bacon, leaving a bit around the edges since bacon tends to shrink when it cooks.Before trimming:
   
   After trimming:
   
6. Then it was time to get cookin’.  Because the bacon grease wouldn’t have anywhere to go but out, we decided to go old school and cook it in the fireplace rather than on the stove.  It took probably 20 minutes over the coals and flame to fully cook the bacon.  We took most of our cues from the bacon sticking out of the Toas-Tite but we did sneak a peak about 15 minutes in to see how it was going.  Once the edges of the bacon were crispy and a little black, we pulled it out of the fire.
   
7. We plopped our bacon-y Toas-Tite onto the cutting board to cool and then it was time to dig in.Whole Toas-Tite:
   Cross section:
   

Final Thoughts

While it wasn’t a “traditional Toas-Tite”, it was amazingly tasty even without the toasty bread that makes Toas-Tite/pie iron sandwiches so special.  The cornbread held its flavor and consistency well.  The bacon wasn’t as crispy as you would get cooking it in a skillet but it was less greasy and did create a good seal for the sandwich.  And although it’s not what you’d call low calorie or low fat, for a rare treat, it’s one I would certainly make again.  Plus you just can’t go wrong with so much bacon-y goodness.