SK week 35 | Grilled Bacon BLTs

This week's Smitten Kitchen recipe was actually a post from Deb on Bon Appetit. I love BLTs, but Dan isn't a tomato fan, so we waited until he had his fantasy football draft scheduled to make these. :) I had never heard of grilling bacon before, but I was intrigued enough to give it a shot!

(Here's the Bon Appetit post)

You'll need:
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 1/2 teaspoons Sriracha
1 pound thick-cut bacon
8 slices bread
2 tomatoes, sliced
salt and pepper
1/2 head iceberg lettuce (I prefer bibb, pictured)

Go start your grill. While it's preheating, mix together your mayo and Sriracha.

Once the grill is preheated, turn down the heat to about medium (I didn't know what that meant in regards to the knobs on my grill, so I had to play with it a little bit).

Flip them once they have some good grill marks. I flipped them a couple more times as they cooked.

Mmmm. Bacon.

Assemble your sandwiches however you like and enjoy with some potato chips. ;) (Don't worry, I ate a whole sandwich, but I didn't think to take a picture until I was half done).

Verdict: It was delicious! A couple things though. 1) The bacon didn't taste different to me. I can understand the pull of not getting grease all over your stovetop, but I generally cook bacon in the oven. So I guess if I REALLY didn't want to turn my oven on, cooking bacon on the grill would be a preferred method. 2) This was really just a basic (albeit delicious) BLT, except for that spicy mayo, which completely made the sandwich for me. It was by far my favorite part, and now I want to find other things to put Sriracha mayo on!

If you need an easy weeknight dinner, this is a great one. Happy last-weekend-of-summer-vacation!

***UPDATE!!!

This is Dan giving a report to the very kind assistant fire chief. It turns out, cooking bacon on your grill can result in quite a bit of grease in the grill pan. Two days after the grilled bacon BLTs, we grilled burgers. When the grill was heating up, Dan said he could tell that some of the bacon grease was still burning off. So he got our burgers cooked and then closed the grill so that it could continue burning and we could turn it off. While we were eating one of the kids noticed that it was pretty smoky. So Dan went back out and opened it up. Flames were shooting out of the grill and the entire pan underneath was engulfed in flames. It seemed like it would eventually burn itself out, but since it was a grease fire and since it was on our wooden deck and fairly close to our house, we decided to call 911. The first to arrive was a police officer, who came into the house and asked for baking soda. He headed to the deck with Dan and by the time I got out there with the baking soda, the fire was out. It had, indeed, eventually burned itself out. So Dan chatted with him for a couple minutes, and I ran to our bedroom to peek out the window at the front yard, where there were now three fire chief trucks with firefighters getting gear on and heading to the backyard. They eventually got the memo that their services were no longer needed. Apparently an actual fire engine eventually showed up as well. We had quite the party on our street! Everyone we talked to was so kind and reassured us that we did the right thing in calling. They'd much rather have a false alarm than have to fight an actual house fire that had spread. Anyway, it was quite an adventure. :)
LESSON LEARNED: I will no longer cook bacon on the grill! It's obviously not worth the hassle, and I would definitely recommend that you cook your bacon on the stove or in the oven like a normal person. ;)