Take bacon. Add sausage. Blog.

By Damon Darlin

International Herald Tribune

For a nation seeking unity, a recipe has swept the Internet that seems
to unite conservatives and liberals, gun owners and foodies, carnivores
and ... well, not vegetarians and health fanatics.

Certainly not the vegetarians and health fanatics.

This recipe is the Bacon Explosion, modestly called by its inventors
"the BBQ Sausage Recipe of all Recipes." The instructions for
constructing this massive torpedo-shaped amalgamation of two pounds of
bacon woven through and around two pounds of sausage and slathered in
barbecue sauce first appeared last month on the Web site of a team of
Kansas City competition barbecuers. They say a diverse collection of
well over 16,000 Web sites have linked to the recipe, celebrating, or
sometimes scolding, its excessiveness. A fresh audience could be ready
to discover it on Super Bowl Sunday.

Where once homegrown recipes were disseminated in Ann Landers columns or
Junior League cookbooks, new media have changed - and greatly
accelerated - the path to popularity. Few recipes have cruised down this
path as fast or as far as the Bacon Explosion, and this turns out to be
no accident. One of its inventors works as an Internet marketer, and had
a sophisticated understanding of how the latest tools of promotion could
be applied to a four-pound roll of pork.

The Bacon Explosion was born shortly before Christmas in Roeland Park,
Kansas, in Jason Day's kitchen. He and Aaron Chronister, who anchor a
barbecue team called Burnt Finger BBQ, were discussing a challenge from
a bacon lover they received on their Twitter text-messaging service:
What could the barbecuers do with bacon?

At the same time, Chronister wanted to get attention for their Web site,
BBQAddicts.com. More traffic would bring in more advertising income,
which they needed to fund a hobby that can cost thousands of dollars.

Day, a systems administrator who has been barbecuing since college,
suggested doing something with a pile of sausage. "It's a variation of
what's called a fattie in the barbecue community," Day said. "But we
took it to the extreme."

He bought about $20 worth of bacon and Italian sausage from a local meat
market. As it lay on the counter, he thought of weaving strips of raw
bacon into a mat. The two spackled the bacon mat with a layer of
sausage, covered that with a crunchy layer of cooked bacon, and rolled
it up tight.

They then stuck the roll - containing at least 5,000 calories and 500
grams of fat - in the Good-One Open Range backyard smoker that they use
for practice. (In competitions, they use a custom-built smoker designed
by the third member of the team, Bryant Gish, who was not present at the
creation of the Bacon Explosion.)

Day said his wife laughed the whole time. "She's very supportive of my
hobby," he said.

The two men posted their adventure on their Web site two days before
Christmas. On Christmas Day, traffic on the site spiked to more than
27,000 visitors.

Chronister explained that the Bacon Explosion "got so much traction on
the Web because it seems so over the top." But Chronister, an Internet
marketer from Kansas City, Missouri, did what he could to help it along.
He first used Twitter to send short text messages about the recipe to
his 1,200 Twitter followers, many of them fellow Internet marketers with
extensive social networks. He also posted links on social networking
sites. "I used a lot of my connections to get it out there and to push
it," he said.

The Bacon Explosion posting has since been viewed about 390,000 times.
It first found a following among barbecue fans, but quickly spread to
sites run by outdoor enthusiasts, off-roaders and hunters. (Several
proposed venison-sausage versions.) It also got mentions on the Web site
of Air America, the liberal radio network, and National Review, the
conservative magazine. Jonah Goldberg at NationalReview.com wrote,
"There must be a reason one reader after another sends me this every
couple hours." Conservatives4palin.com linked, too.

So did regular people. A man from Wooster, Ohio, wrote that friends had
served it at a bon voyage party before his 10-day trip to Israel, where
he expected bacon to be in short supply. "It wasn't planned as a
send-off for me to Israel, but with all of the pork involved it sure
seemed like it," he wrote.

About 30 people sent in pictures of their Explosions. One sent a video
of the log catching fire on a grill.

Day said that whether it is cooked in an oven or in a smoker, the
rendered fat from the bacon keeps the sausage juicy. But in the smoker,
he said, the smoke heightens the flavor of the meats.

Nick Pummell, a barbecue hobbyist in Las Vegas, learned of the recipe
from Chronister's Twittering. He made his first Explosion on Christmas
Day, when he and a group of friends also had a more traditional turkey.
"This was kind of the dessert part," he said. "You need to call 911
after you are done. It was awesome."

Chronister said the main propellant behind the Bacon Explosion's spread
was a Web service called StumbleUpon, which steers Web users toward
content they are likely to find interesting. Readers tell the service
about their professional interests or hobbies, and it serves up sites to
match them. More than 7 million people worldwide use the service in an
attempt to duplicate serendipity, the company says.

Chronister intended to send the post to StumbleUpon, but one of his
readers beat him to it. It appeared on the front page of StumbleUpon for
three days, which further increased traffic.

Chronister also littered his site with icons for Digg, Del.icio.us and
other sites in which readers vote on posts or Web pages they like,
helping to spread the word. "Alright this is going on Digg," a commenter
wrote minutes after the Explosion was posted. "Already there," someone
else answered.

Some have claimed that the Bacon Explosion is derivative. A writer known
as the Headless Blogger posted a similar roll of sausage and bacon in
mid-December. Chronister and Day do not claim to have invented the
concept.

But they do vigorously defend their method. When one commenter dared to
suggest that the two hours in the smoker could be slashed to a mere 30
minutes if the roll was first cooked in a microwave oven, Chronister
snapped back. "Microwave??? Seriously? First, the proteins in the meats
will bind around 140 degrees, so putting it on the smoker after that is
pointless as it won't absorb any smoke flavor," he responded on his
site. "This requires patience and some attention. It's not McDonald's."