Bacon Explosion recipe is most popular on the web

The Bacon Explosion - a recipe for a 5,000 calorie barbeque dish - has become one of the most popular meal ideas in the world after being posted in a blog.

It is such an internet hit that the blog on which it features, www.bbqaddicts.com, has attracted more than 500,000 page views in the past month. Its creators, Jason Day, 27, and Aaron Chronister, 32, are now famous as the men who came up with the ultimate route to "pork nirvana".

Bacon Explosion fanclubs have sprung up on Facebook, a video of one family attempting the recipe - and accidentally setting it on fire - has received 50,000 hits on YouTube, and a picture of the meal in all its glory has graced the New York Times.

Day and Chronister, from Kansas City, compete in barbeque cook-offs as the Burnt Finger BBQ team and came up with the delicacy after being challenged on Twitter to create the ultimate bacon recipe. They christened it Bacon Explosion: The BBQ Sausage Recipe of all Recipes.

The Bacon Explosion contains 5,000 calories and a mind-boggling 500 grams of fat, prompting one commenter to joke: "They should make drive-through angioplasty, it would make this much easier."

The ingredients list is short:

2 pounds thick cut bacon

2 pounds Italian sausage meat

1 jar of your favourite barbeque sauce

1 jar of your favourite barbeque rub/seasoning

Construction begins with what its inventors call a "5x5 bacon weave" of interlocking rashers. After coating them with a generous helping of barbeque seasoning, the next step is to layer two pounds of sausage meat on top of the bacon to create a patty.

Next, cover the raw sausage meat with fried bacon - soft or crispy, depending on personal preference - chopped or crumbled into small pieces. The chefs advise: "Note - it's okay, and encouraged, to snack on these pieces while you're chopping/crumbling. But keep in mind that once those bacon morsels touch the raw sausage, you'll need to resist all temptations to nibble. This can and will be difficult, but hospital trips are no fun, so stay strong."

Drizzle barbeque sauce over the top of the cooked bacon, sprinkle with more barbeque seasoning and the roll into a giant, sausage-shaped monster. One final dusting of seasoning, and the construction is ready to be smoked on the barbeque. Cooking time varies but should take around one hour for each inch of thickness.

Once cooked, the Bacon Explosion is basted with more barbeque sauce ("Sweet sauces are loaded with sugars, so they'll give your fatty a nice glossy finish.")

Slice into rounds to serve.

Day and Chronister explained: "It's a variation of what's called a 'fatty' in the barbeque community. We took it to the extreme." They said of the internet interest: "It started out on Twitter and from there it just went everywhere. Political blogs picked it up for some reason - Republicans like meat."

Source: telegraph