Overview

The event took place on June 10, 2017, starting at 11:30AM until around 8:00PM.

The weather was hot (92°F) but the wind helped keep it bearable.

Appetizers prepared:

• Bacon Wrapped Stuffed Jalapeno’s (a.k.a. "ABTs" or "Atomic Buffalo Turds")
• Baked Beans
• Pig Candy
• Jerk Chicken Wings
• Pork Ribs (no special recipe, just cooked on grill and added BBQ sauce)
• Bacon (various flavors)

Main dish: Burgers

We went with a "traditional backyard BBQ"-style this year and tried to see if we could make them memorable by adding bacon. It seemed to go over pretty well... ;-)

We did two styles of sliders but the base recipe for the hamburger meat was the same: 60% beef, 40% bacon, and a little Chicago-style steak seasoning and pepper added in.

Everything was ground the night before the event. The beef was from a steer I helped butcher at home (in North Dakota), as my family farms up there. The cuts of meat were a mixture of chuck and sirloin roasts (we did not keep track of the ratio). The bacon was all homemade, which involves curing it for ~2 weeks and then smoking for 4-5 hours. The source of the pork for the bacon was Costco this year.

The prep was done using 8"x11" tinfoil pans, resulting in each "layer" of burger being almost perfectly sized for a full loaf of Hawaiin slider buns, so we could prepare a dozen burgers at a time.

Bacon Cheese Burgers

With regards to preparation, this was literally just your standard bacon cheese burger: burger, Boar's Head Extra Sharp Cheddar Cheese, topped with bacon, ketchup, and mustard.

Note: One thing you may want to try out at home is that we chopped up the bacon before putting it on the burger, versus putting it on in strips. Put ketchup & mustard on the burger, then sprinkle the chopped up bacon on top.

Doing this gives you a more even distribution of bacon and avoids the tragic situation of accidentally pulling out an entire strip of bacon in one bite. That's just garbage and, frankly, we will not allow it.

Fig & Brie Burger

Again, there was no "special" preparation on these: we cooked them until they were almost done, added good quality brie cheese, and spread fig jam on the top-layer of the buns. Sprinkle the chopped bacon on the jam-side (see "Note" above).