http://blog.belm.com Random spurious persiflage Fri, 03 Feb 2012 02:36:45 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Random spurious persiflage no http://blog.belm.com/2011/07/29/goin-to-chicago/ http://blog.belm.com/2011/07/29/goin-to-chicago/#comments Fri, 29 Jul 2011 21:21:08 +0000 David http://blog.belm.com/?p=8553 http://blog.belm.com/2011/07/29/goin-to-chicago/feed/ 4 Starting tomorrow, She Who Must Be Obeyed, He Who Will Not Be Ignored, and I are taking a well-deserved vacation. We’re driving out to Chicago by way of Cleveland (Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, Lola restaurant), spending a week sightseeing and eating (Next, Publican, Boka, and various hot dog emporia), then returning by way of Buffalo (Niagara Falls  and wings at She Who and He Who’s insistence, respectively. I’ll take notes and photos, and may post a few quick updates. I also intend to settle once and for all whether Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Our road music will start with the classic “Going to Chicago Blues,” a version performed by Lambert, Hendrix, and Ross with the Count Basie Orchestra and the immortal Joe Williams, from Sing a Song of Basie: Starting tomorrow, She Who Must Be Obeyed, He Who Will Not Be Ignored, and I are taking a well-deserved vacation. We’re driving out to Chicago by way of Cleveland (Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, Lola restaurant), spending a week sightseeing [...] http://blog.belm.com/2011/06/08/coffee-and-donuts/ http://blog.belm.com/2011/06/08/coffee-and-donuts/#comments Thu, 09 Jun 2011 00:27:36 +0000 David http://blog.belm.com/?p=7862 http://blog.belm.com/2011/06/08/coffee-and-donuts/feed/ 0 Saturday evening’s dinner ended with this dessert, a bit of kitchen improv inspired by Thomas Keller’s famous “Coffee and Doughnuts” from the French Laundry. A Facebook friend had posted a comment about making glazed donut ice cream – an idea that’s obvious once you see it written down – which prompted a trip to the corner Dunkie’s (it’s half a block from the police station) for a half dozen of their finest glazed treats. (I assume my LA-based friend used something more local like Winchell’s.) I grabbed some milk and cream on the return trip and was ready to go. I heated a cup each of the milk and cream, dissolved a half cup of sugar (reduced from the usual three quarters cup, accounting for the glaze that would go into solution), and added four whole donuts to steep. After about half an hour and a few pokes with a spatula, the donuts turned into sludge, which I strained out of the dairy base. Did I sample the remaining sludge? You know I did. Mmm… donut sludge… . I reheated the mixture, tempered six egg yolks, returned everything to the pot and cooked the custard. It was standard ice cream procedure from that point on: add the custard to another cup of cream chilling in an ice bath, stir until cooled, refrigerate overnight, then churn in an ice cream machine. I had ice cream ready a few days in advance, but how would I serve it? I knew I should accompany it with something coffee-flavored, but it took another day to realize that a coffee gelée would provide an interesting contrast. I made the gelée with a cup of brewed coffee, a cup of water with two tablespoons of sugar dissolved in it, a half teaspoon of vanilla extract, and three sheets of gelatin bloomed in ice water. After stirring everything together, I ladled about half a cup of the gel into bowls and let them sit in the fridge to set. I needed one more component, something with a bit of crunch. I had some chocolate tart dough left from the birthday dinner, so I planned to roll it out, bake the sheet, and cut it into irregular shapes to use as a garnish. I abandoned that idea when our guest arrived with two boxes of macarons: Chocolate on the left, Starbucks caramel macchiato on the right (certified as accurate by a Starbucks barista) – I had a new garnish for the plate. To assemble this do-ahed dessert. I placed a scoop of ice cream on the gelée, topped it with some chocolate-covered roasted cacao nibs, leaned a macaron against the ice cream, and added a dusting of dry caramel (the gift that keeps on giving). Lots of different textures; donut flavor balanced against coffee, chocolate, and caramel; bitter cacao and gelée against sweet ice cream – this dessert had it all going on. It’s a keeper, but, sadly, I’ll have to revert to the chocolate crisps because we inhaled all of the macarons. One thought kept running through my head as I ate: Apparently not. Sources: Donuts: Dunkin’ Donuts Milk, cream: Sherman Market Cacao nibs: Taza Chocolate Macarons: Maggie’s Creations Pâtisserie Saturday evening’s dinner ended with this dessert, a bit of kitchen improv inspired by Thomas Keller’s famous “Coffee and Doughnuts” from the French Laundry. A Facebook friend had posted a comment about making glazed donut ice cream – an [...] http://blog.belm.com/2010/11/12/get-lamp/ http://blog.belm.com/2010/11/12/get-lamp/#comments Sat, 13 Nov 2010 01:39:45 +0000 David http://blog.belm.com/?p=5843 http://blog.belm.com/2010/11/12/get-lamp/feed/ 1 If you are a gaming geek of a certain age, the phrase “get lamp” should evoke a whole series of memories. For me they remind me of nights spent in the basement of McGregor House at MIT, where I played Adventure, the first computer text game, on a DEC line printer terminal (complete with 300 baud modem!). Get Lamp is also the name of a new documentary about the world of computer text adventures, released a few months ago by director Jason Scott. It’s a classic rise-and-fall story, packed full of interviews with the people responsible for the creation of the art form, and, due to a series of coincidences, it includes me as well. Click here to view the embedded video. I was at the release party for Guitar Hero II, the sequel to the runaway hit by Harmonix, a Cambridge-based company started by a few grad students from the Media Lab. The Harmonix COO was Mike Dornbrook, an old MIT colleague who had survived the rise and fall of Infocom, the leading creator of text adventures, also founded by MIT students decades earlier. I saw Mike and went to say hello when I noticed he was talking to a very earnest fellow I didn’t recognize. Mike broke off the conversation to say hello to me, since we hand’t see each other in a few years. He apologized for having to leave, saying he was about to take a “life-changing telephone call” back at the office (which turned out to be the agreement to be purchased by Viacom). That left me with the other guy, who asked me “How do you know Mike Dornbrook so well?” “We were classmates at MIT.” “You were around when Zork was written?” “Yup. I watched Mike and his friends start Infocom.” “Then I need to interview you for my next film.” He introduced himself as Jason Scott, a name I recognized from his stint as a guest blogger at Boing Boing. (Remember when they ran a guest blog in the sidebar?) He had just released BBS, a documentary about early computer bulletin board systems. He told me his next project was going to be about computer text adventures, and , a few months later, we spent a few hours in my office talking about Infocom and MIT. This is what they were printing: That part of the conversation, along with a few other excerpts, is included in one of the DVD bonus features, Examine Infocom. I’m also in the main movie, in the section about creating maps of the games; my Adventure map is prominently featured. (Yes, I finished the game. No, I didn’t collect all of the points. Yes, I have a separate matrix mapping of the mazes. No, I don’t apologize for being a geek.) Ars Technica has a much better review of the DVD than I could ever write, so I encourage you to check it out. (He Who Will Not Be Ignored has a review as well: “My dad’s in a movie! It’s awesome!”) Watching the DVD was a bittersweet experience for me; it was difficult to watch friends succeed and then fail as newer technology – computers with powerful graphics processors – made their work “obsolete.” But, as the final section of Get Lamp shows, there’a still a large active community out there that is interested in interactive fiction. One of the current practitioners, Andrew Plotkin, has raised more than $20,000 via Kickstarter to write Hadean Lands, an interactive text adventure for the iPhone. I like playing graphics-intensive games on the PS3, Xbox, and Wii as much as the next person, but games with unusual plots are few and far between because they don’t sell. That’s why text adventures never really died; they are as varied as favorite books that you can pull of the shelf and immerse yourself in at your own pace. The appeal is sumarized neatly in the coin that comes with every copy of Get Lamp: If you are a gaming geek of a certain age, the phrase “get lamp” should evoke a whole series of memories. For me they remind me of nights spent in the basement of McGregor House at MIT, where I played Adventure, the first computer text game, on [...] http://blog.belm.com/2010/07/15/chocolate-ice-cream/ http://blog.belm.com/2010/07/15/chocolate-ice-cream/#comments Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:48:03 +0000 David http://blog.belm.com/?p=4519 http://blog.belm.com/2010/07/15/chocolate-ice-cream/feed/ 5 My chocolate ice cream is richer than the legendary Toscanini’s Chocolate No. 2 (Dark).” I made that boast last year, but never followed up with any proof, or even a recipe. A combination of feeling like cooking again, summer heat, and the arrival of a new kitchen gadget spurred me to make said chocolate ice cream. My original recipe was from the Cook’s Illustrated booklet How to Make Ice Cream, but I discovered an improvement in David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop. Unlike the Haagen-Dasz Five, this recipe requires eight ingredients: two cups of heavy cream, a cup of whole milk, five egg yolks, three tablespoons of Dutch-process cocoa, five ounces of chopped bittersweet chocolate (I used Valrhona 62%), three quarters of a cup of sugar, a half teaspoon of vanilla extract, and a pinch of salt. A Brief Digression About Heavy Cream When I started making ice cream, I knew enough to always buy heavy cream instead of “whipping cream,” because the butterfat content was different in each product (lower in whipping cream). Later I started seeking out heavy cream that was pasteurized instead of ultra-pasteurized (less degradation of the fat), which is usually found in organic brands. This year, when I first bought heavy cream from my neighborhood “local only” market, the fellow behind the counter pointed out that the cream wasn’t modified with carrageenan. I thought he was joking, but then I started reading labels more carefully. Most store-bought heavy cream contains carrageenan to aid in maintaining peaks when whipped. In addition, you’ll find mono-and diglycerides have been added to improve the aeration capacity of the cream. Either of these additives may not alter the taste of the cream, but I prefer to work with pure ingredients, even if they cost more. Back to the recipe: I whisked the cocoa into a cup of the cream, heating slowly until it came to a low boil. I let the mixture simmer for another thirty seconds before removing the pan from the heat and adding the chopped chocolate. I stirred until the chocolate was completely melted and smooth. I stirred in the remaining cup of cream and transferred the mix to a large measuring pitcher. Using the same pan, I warmed up the milk, added the sugar and salt, and stirred until everything was dissolved. I whisked the yolks together in a separate bowl, then slowly added the warm milk mixture, whisking all the time to temper the eggs. I returned the eggs to the pan set over medium heat, and stirred until the custard thickened. Simple egg/cream custards usually thicken around 175° F, but the addition of the sugar acts as a buffer, allowing the temperature to go higher without curdling the eggs. I’ve made a few custards in my time, so I tend to go by feel: as the custard thickens, the drag on the spatula increases. I poured the custard through a fine-meshed strainer (to catch any potential overcooked egg bits) into the chocolate and cream, which was set over a bowl of ice water. I stirred until the mix cooled down to room temperature, then added the vanilla extract. (Adding the extract while the mixture is still warm cooks off some of the aromatic compounds.) After an overnight stay in the fridge — it’s essential to have the mix as cold as possible — it was time to churn up some ice cream. As recently as last month I used a Cuisinart ice cream maker with a stainless steel insert that had to be pre-chilled to freeze the goop inside (a eutectic mixture, today’s vocabulary word). After two years of patient waiting, I was finally able to score a refurbished Cuisinart pro machine, courtesy of Woot!. It gets colder, has a slower churn speed, and allows me to make more than one batch at a time. The downside is that it is LOUD. Observe: Click here to view the embedded video. Pretty noisy, but that’s what should be expected when, to paraphrase Dr. Egon Spengler, you run an unlicensed refrigeration device on your kitchen table. Thirty five minutes later I [...] My chocolate ice cream is richer than the legendary Toscanini’s Chocolate No. 2 (Dark).” I made that boast last year, but never followed up with any proof, or even a recipe. A combination of feeling like cooking again, summer heat, and the [...] http://blog.belm.com/2010/04/08/the-delian-mode/ http://blog.belm.com/2010/04/08/the-delian-mode/#comments Thu, 08 Apr 2010 20:30:14 +0000 David http://blog.belm.com/?p=3937 http://blog.belm.com/2010/04/08/the-delian-mode/feed/ 2 Many of my friends have their knickers in a twist about the “New Doctor,” i.e., the actor playing the newest incarnation of Doctor Who, the perennial British science fiction TV series. Having seen a few episodes over the years, and being completely underwhelmed by the show’s low-budget cheesiness (blame the BBC), I have steadfastly refused to watch it. (I am an equal-opportunity hater: my contempt for Doctor Who is surpassed by my loathing of the original Star Trek.) The one thing that Who has over every science fiction series is it’s theme music, that chilling combination of wooshes and theremin-like melody that has never been improved upon since its appearance in 1963: Ask Who fans who wrote that theme, and they’ll tell you it was Ron Grainer, the television and film composer who would later go on to write the theme for The Prisoner. Ask fans who realized the theme, who committed it to tape, and they’ll draw a blank. Again, blame the BBC: Grainer wanted to split his royalties with his collaborator, but was against Beeb policy. And so, a pioneering electronic composer was denied credit and almost doomed to obscurity. That composer was Delia Derbyshire (pronounced “darby-sheer”), and she was a genius. She joined the legendary BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1962, and, working out of Room 13 with decommissioned equipment, created almost 200 pieces of incidental music for radio and television. She worked primarily with microphones and found objects, splicing notes together on tape. Synthesizers and multi-track recording had yet to be invented, so she made do with what was available, as seen here (using loops from her composition “Pot Au Feu”): Click here to view the embedded video. Look at that again: she’s beat-matching and mixing four separate tape recorders, a feat that only the most skilled of turntablists could manage today. (And call me out on my often-professed geekiness, but I think she’s hot.) In 1969 she joined the group White Noise, whose first recording, An Electric Storm, was an experiment in merging psychedelia with electronic sounds. The record became a cult classic, years later influencing the sound of Orbital, Broadcast, and Stereolab. Delia left the BBC in 1973, the same year that synthesizers were introduced at the Workshop. She thought that they stifled creativity, and refused to use the instruments to speed up her deliberate output. She stopped composing and remained in retirement until her death in 2001. In a 1997 interview on Radio Scotland (part 1, part 2) she talks about her career and influence, well worth the listen. She’s finally getting her due. The BBC aired a documentary on the Radiophonic workshop called The Alchemists of Sound. The section about Delia starts at the 2:50 mark: Click here to view the embedded video. The bit about playing the lampshade is a technique that Brian Eno nicked ten years later. The gongs at the end of “Some of Them Are Old” and that play in the background through out “Here Come the Warm Jets” are recordings of a struck lampshade played at different speeds. This year saw the release of The Delian Mode, a short film about Derbyshire’s career by Kara Blake. Click here to view the embedded video. It has recently become available on DVD, you can purchase it from the web site. Last year it was announced that 267 tapes had been recovered from Delia’s attic after she died. This article from the BBC contains several samples of material from the tapes, including a mind-blowing “experimental dance track” that sound like it was recorded yesterday. Perhaps the most fitting tribute to her influence was this encore, the last live performance by Orbital, recorded at the BBC Maida Vale studio — the home of the Radiophonic Workshop. The song still kills four decades later. Many of my friends have their knickers in a twist about the “New Doctor,” i.e., the actor playing the newest incarnation of Doctor Who, the perennial British science fiction TV series. Having seen a few episodes over the years, and being [...] http://blog.belm.com/2010/02/05/more-mellodrama/ http://blog.belm.com/2010/02/05/more-mellodrama/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:33:35 +0000 David http://blog.belm.com/?p=3413 http://blog.belm.com/2010/02/05/more-mellodrama/feed/ 0 I received a few replies following the Melodrama post, in which you attempted to guess all 24 of the songs used in this clip, “Mash-Mello”: As promised, here is the list of clips, in Artist, Album, “Song” format: King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King, “In the Court of the Crimson King” U2, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, “Beautiful Day” King Crimson, Lizard, “Cirkus” Matching Mole, Matching Mole, “O Caroline” Air, The Virgin Suicides, “Playground Love” The Flaming Lips, The Soft Bulletin, “Race for the Prize” Opeth, Damnaton, “Windowpane” (Melotron samples played on a Clavia Nord keyboard) Radiohead, OK Computer, “Exit Music (For A Film)” Oasis, What’s the Story, Morning Glory?, “Wonderwall” Yes, Close to the Edge, “And You And I” Captain Beefheart, Doc at the Radio Station, “Ashtray Heart” Tangerine Dream, Phaedra, “Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares” Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy, “The Rain Song” The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour, “Flying” Talk Talk, The Colour of Spring, “Life’s What You Make It” Kraftwerk, Trans-Europe Express, “Trans-Europe Express” (Vako Orchestron, not Mellotron) Pink Floyd, Ummagumma, “Sysyphus, Pt. 1″ Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Architecture and Morality, “Joan of Arc” Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy, “Kashmir” (The segment in the clip is actually real instruments, but the Mellotron sections also contain vocals which are too easily identified.) Big Star, #1 Record, “The India Song” Genesis, Selling England by the Pound, “Cinema Show” Yes, Fragile, “Heart of the Sunrise” David Bowie, David Bowie, “Space Oddity” Genesis, Foxtrot, Watcher of the Skies These artists, and any more rescued the Chamberlin and Mellotron from grandma’s living room. If not, we would have had a lot more of this: Click here to view the embedded video. I received a few replies following the Melodrama post, in which you attempted to guess all 24 of the songs used in this clip, “Mash-Mello”: As promised, here is the list of clips, in Artist, Album, “Song” format: King Crimson, In the Court [...] http://blog.belm.com/2010/02/03/mellodrama/ http://blog.belm.com/2010/02/03/mellodrama/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:59:36 +0000 David http://blog.belm.com/?p=3367 http://blog.belm.com/2010/02/03/mellodrama/feed/ 23 The flutes that open “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Stairway to Heaven,” the strings in”Nights in White Satin” — these are sounds you know by heart. What you may not know is that they were played on a keyboard instrument called the Mellotron. When I was a high school prog music geek with a crappy band, I practiced my keyboard skills by learning parts from records, playing along with Yes, Genesis, and ELP. I only had an electric piano and organ, and was able to borrow a synthesizer every now and then, but laying my hands on a Mellotron became my Grail quest. I would show up early to help set up for the school dances in the hopes that I’d get to fiddle around with the keyboard setups from the bands we hired to play. At one dance, Larry McGowan, the keyboard player for local band Rat Race Choir, invited me to check out his latest acquisition, a huge dual-manual Mellotron. Or so I thought, until he explained that it was a custom-built Chamberlin, an instrument made in the US that competed with the UK-built Mellotron. It wasn’t until I visited Noise New Jersey – the studio where legendary producer Kramer recorded bands like Galaxie 500, Low, and Ween – that I finally got to play a real Mellotron, a temperamental model M400 (a similar model is pictured above). It was almost impossible to keep in tune but an absolute thrill to play. The instrument has been around for almost fifty years. Here’s a mash-up I made of some songs containing different Mellotron sounds (a mash-Mello?) that spans five decades. See how many you can name; I’ll provide the answers after I receive a few comments with your guesses): What triggered this nostalgic reverie was the recent release of Mellodrama, a documentary by Dianna Dilworth that tracks the rise, fall, and resurrection of the world’s first sampling instrument. Click here to view the embedded video. This fascinating film tells an all-too-common American technology story: home inventor creates something in his garage, the idea is stolen and commercialized by another company, the technology is eventually replaced by something newer, and only then is the inventor credited for his work. In this case, we learn about Harry Chamberlin, who created his eponymous instrument in the late 1940s as a way to have an “orchestra at your fingertips.” He recorded members of the Lawrence Welk Orchestra onto multitrack tape, then created a keyboard mechanism to play the sounds. When you pressed a key, a drive mechanism would move a tape loop past a playback head, playing the note you selected in one of three instrument voices. Choosing an instrument sound moved the playback head over the appropriate track on the loop. Since there were no limits on what could be recorded onto tape, the Chamberlin utilized two keyboards: the left manual played rhythm tracks and chords, while the right manual played solo instruments. In the early 1960s, Chamberlin hired a salesman, Bill Franson, who secretly took two of the instruments to England and found a company that would replicate them. The company, Streetly Electronics (an electronics manufacturing company owned by the Bradley brothers) in collaboration with Mellotronics Ltd. (the financial backer/marketing company run by Eric Robinson) sold the new instrument in the UK. A few years later, when the Mellotron made its debut at  NAMM — a US music instrument manufacturers convention — Streetly learned that they had been deceived by Franson. They agreed to pay royalties and to sell exclusively in Europe, ceding North America to Chamberlin. The Mellotron became the defining sound of 1970s prog rock. Although its sound banks weren’t as well-recorded as Chamberlin’s, the instrument itself was more roadworthy. But just barely: keyboard players of the time complained bitterly about the failings of the instrument. King Crimson’s Robert Fripp wryly observed “Tuning a Mellotron doesn’t.” Many touring bands traveled with two Mellotrons [...] The flutes that open “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Stairway to Heaven,” the strings in”Nights in White Satin” — these are sounds you know by heart. What you may not know is that they were played on a keyboard instrument called the [...] http://blog.belm.com/2009/12/11/can-i-get-an-amen/ http://blog.belm.com/2009/12/11/can-i-get-an-amen/#comments Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:37:41 +0000 David http://blog.belm.com/?p=2908 http://blog.belm.com/2009/12/11/can-i-get-an-amen/feed/ 0 It began as a conversation about that awful Tommy Seebach video (which I refuse to embed here – you have been warned). I told a friend that it was a cover of The Incredible Bongo Band’s cover of “Apache” by The Shadows. The IBB version has been called “hip-hop’s anthem” due to the frequency with which it has been sampled in other songs. When vinyl was still the source of hip-hop beats, the Ultimate Breaks and Beats series was released to provide DJs with new breaks. Most of the tracks released in the series spawned dozens of new hip-hop records, but there are three building blocks upon which the majority of hip-hop was built: “Apache,” “Funky Drummer” by James Brown, and “Amen, Brother” by the Winstons. “Amen Brother” – the B-side of “Color Him Father,” a song that earned the Winstons a Grammy award in 1969 – was an instrumental version of “Amen” from the movie “Lilies of the Field” (Sidney Poitier’s voice is dubbed by Jester Hairston, the song’s composer). The drum break, performed by G.C. Coleman, was rediscovered by crate-digging DJs and released on Volume 1 of Ultimate Breaks and Beats. This is the UBB version, remixed from the original: The Amen break may be the most sampled break in the history of popular music, described by artist Nate Harrison as “a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures.” Even I couldn’t resist sampling it when I was playing with a parakeet training record: Click here to view the embedded video. The drum pattern is a sped-up Amen break. Speeding up the break was the conceptual breakthrough that formed the backbone of dance subgenres jungle, breakbeat hardcore, and drum-and-bass (DnB). But rather than tell you more, I leave your further musical education to Nate Harrison in his installation “Can I Get an Amen?”: Click here to view the embedded video. The current litigious musical environment created by the last of the major record labels has made it nearly impossible to create sample-based music. Hip-hop classics like De La Soul’s “Three Feet High and Rising” (the subject of one of the first sample use lawsuits), the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique,” and Public Enemy’s “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” could never be made today due to the cost of sample licensing. As Harrison puts it: To trace the history of the Amen break is to trace the history of a brief period of time when it seemed digital tools offered a potentially unlimited amount of new forms of expression, where cultural production – at least musically – was full of possibilities by virtue of being able to freely appropriate from the musical past to make new combinations, and thus new meanings. The story demonstrates, that a society “free to borrow and build upon the past is culturally richer than a controlled one.” Is it possible to litigate an art form out of existence? It began as a conversation about that awful Tommy Seebach video (which I refuse to embed here – you have been warned). I told a friend that it was a cover of The Incredible Bongo Band’s cover of “Apache” by The Shadows. The IBB version has [...] Winstons http://blog.belm.com/2009/05/25/bacon-explosion/ http://blog.belm.com/2009/05/25/bacon-explosion/#comments Mon, 25 May 2009 21:34:47 +0000 David http://blog.belm.com/?p=1321 http://blog.belm.com/2009/05/25/bacon-explosion/feed/ 4 I was at Costco on Wednesday, getting a head start on my Memorial Day weekend barbecue preparations. I already had two full racks of pork ribs (St. Louis style) in my cart and a box of three one-pound bacon packs in my hand, when I noticed a two-pound tube of Jimmy Dean pork sausage on the shelf. As my gaze shifted between the two processed pork products, the gears in my head slowly engaged: There’s something you can cook with both of these things. Then it hit me: the Bacon Explosion, a recipe forwarded to me by a friend last winter. He dared me to cook one, and now it was time to take on the challenge. What follows is my humble execution of this epitome of the barbecued pork arts, handed down from on high by the geniuses at BBQ Addicts. I began by frying up an entire pound of bacon until it was crisp. You’ve seen bacon frying, so the photo is completely gratuitous, but still: Bacon! While the first pound of bacon sizzled away, I built the first bacon layer. My bacon wasn’t thick-cut, so I upped the dimensions from 5 by 5 to 6 by 6. I had to reach back to my Cub Scout potholder-making skills to construct the weave. I sprinkled the weave with my favorite barbecue dry rub: All-South Rub from Chris Schlesinger’s The Thrill of the Grill. I spread the loose sausage on top of the bacon mat, making sure it reached the edges and had an even thickness. I spread the crumbled cooked bacon — minus a few slices I sampled for quality control purposes — over the sausage. I sprinkled more dry rub over the bacon, then doused it with barbecue sauce. I used Cattlemen’s Golden Honey sauce. Then came the tricky part: I rolled the sausage and crumbled bacon layer away from me, leaving the bacon mat untouched. I tried to keep the roll uniform and free of air pockets and sauce leaks. For the final assembly I rolled the sausage back toward me, including the bacon mat. I ended up with a weave-covered sausage with the seam on the bottom. (Those BBQ Addicts thought of everything — there was clearly research involved with this step.) I finished off with another coating of dry rub on the outside. I dropped this pork bomb on my smoker at the halfway point in my rib cooking time. (Did I mention that I was cooking ribs? Because the Explosion was meant to be a side dish.) It cooked for 3 hours at 225°F, bathed in cherry wood smoke. I skipped the sauce glaze on the outside since I’m a sauce-on-the-side guy. After a brief rest I sliced the roll into half inch thick rounds. Look at that cross section: bacon, pink smoke ring, cooked sausage, and more bacon. It tasted as good as it looked: a slight sweetness from the cherry smoke, more sweetness from the sauce, soft bacon on the outside contrasting with crispy on the inside, with the firm sausage giving it a bit of chew. I’ll certainly be making this again. Now that I know how good it tastes and how relatively simple it is to prepare, I’ll splurge on loose Italian sausage next time to add more spice. Oh, and the ribs were also tasty. Making this delectable treat resulted in a song being stuck in my head, the “Deththeme” from Metalocalypse, the animated series. I kept hearing the singer’s name — “Nathan Explosion,” the last two word of the song — as “Bacon Explosion!” And now you will, too. Click here to view the embedded video. I was at Costco on Wednesday, getting a head start on my Memorial Day weekend barbecue preparations. I already had two full racks of pork ribs (St. Louis style) in my cart and a box of three one-pound bacon packs in my hand, when I noticed a [...] http://blog.belm.com/2009/04/29/what-i-say/ http://blog.belm.com/2009/04/29/what-i-say/#comments Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:35:23 +0000 David http://blog.belm.com/?p=1113 http://blog.belm.com/2009/04/29/what-i-say/feed/ 2 We’re back from our London vacation. I was reviewing some of the video footage we shot, and found this, taken by Diane at the British Museum: Click here to view the embedded video. We were concerned that Miles would be either bored with or overwhelmed by the amount of information at the museum. As you can see, our fears were unfounded. Not a bad summary for a ten-year-old. We’re back from our London vacation. I was reviewing some of the video footage we shot, and found this, taken by Diane at the British Museum: We were concerned that Miles would be either bored with or overwhelmed by the amount of information at [...]