Bucket List: Make a Bacon Roll

Posted by Double M




If you subscribe to my shared items feed you probably saw the awesome pics of a bacon roll which could alternatively be known as a heart attack roll. Well, as with several things on the intermist, I didn't necessarily believe that it would turn out as well as it looked but I did believe it looked delicious, so I decided to make one for our office Christmas party.

Turns out they were awesome. I've included pics with some added instructions below.

Step 1) Weave the bacon
This step is pretty self-explanatory. Depending on the size of your bacon, you will use between 12-14 strips in a normal weave.



You'll notice that I made two bacon rolls. The right side is a normal sized bacon roll, the left side is a super-large bacon roll in which I wove two weaves together. My hope was to fold this weave "hot-dog" style so that I would have more pieces. Here is a picture where you can see the bacon pieces overlapping.



Step 2) Get it hot, like 400 degrees
There wasn't really any instructions for this included in the original list. So, I preheated the oven to 400 degrees and cooked the bacon for 15 minutes (this seemed to be all over the mist so I was cool with it). I didn't want to get the bacon crispy because I wanted to keep the weave together when I rolled it. Also, I cooked it in pans with edges so that the bacon grease didn't spill all over the oven (causing chaos and hysteria!).

Step 3) Make it rain (cheese) on that weave
I bought a huge bag of shredded cojack cheese and coated the bacon. I used about 12 ounces on the normal weave and about 20 ounces on the big weave. This was probably too much considering the cheese wasn't melting as much as I wanted, so I stuck them back into the oven (which I had shut off but was still hot) for about one minute. This made the cheese sufficiently melt. Picture of the pre-melted bacon wrap below.





Step 4) Roll it up
Turns out rolling up the bacon wrap is the hardest part because it is freaking hot. My advice: wait one minute then use tongs to grab along as much of the short edge as you can and roll it over. Once the first flip is complete, completing the bacon roll is actually pretty easy. Here's a picture of the completed bacon rolls.



You'll notice that both of the rolls are the same size. This is where I made my only mistake of the process. I rolled the super-bacon roll on the short edge instead of the long edge meaning I created one ultra-fat bacon roll (the one in front) instead of one normal-sized, extra long bacon roll. It turned out alright.

Step 5) Wrap it up
You can skip this step if you're making and eating the roll at home, but if you're going somewhere you may want to wrap the bacon roll in tin foil and throw it back in your warm oven until you leave. Once you cut it, these things lose heat like crazy, so make sure you don't cut it until you want to eat it (that said, it still tastes great a little cool, so its not the end of the world if its cold).

Step 6) Time to do some cutting
In the pictures from the original bacon roll, it looks like there was only 6-8 pieces of the bacon roll. This seemed like it could be expensive if you wanted to take it to a party, so I decided to cut them a lot smaller. Here's a suggestion though, use stick a toothpick in a piece and then cut it out of the roll. This way each piece will stay together (otherwise each piece will start to fall apart). Here is a picture of how the pieces look.



The plate was actually a lot more full (completely full actually) but between the time I set out the plate and took a picture, that's what happened.

Turns out they are pretty freaking good and it only takes about 25 minutes start to finish.

My recommendation: make it. You will not immediately regret the bacon roll.