My inspiration for this dish comes from the French hot dog: a half baguette is impaled on a hot iron longways. This serves the dual purposes of toasting the inside of the bun along with creating a hole in the baguette. A sauce-covered is then forced into the hole in the baguette. The result is a delicious sandwich/hotdog.
So given that the theme of this challenge was bread, I figured I could create a French hot dog on the grill. BUT, rather than using a plain hot dog, I'd use a smoked fatty.
I was inspired by a post on this board describing the 3-2-1 method as applied to a fatty. Well, I thought, why cook it for two hours in foil when you could cook it for two hours encased in dough?
The plan was as follows: smoke a fatty for 3 hours. While that is smoking, prepare my bread dough. After three hours, pull out the fatty. Lay out the dough into a flat rectangle, push the fatty into the dough and wrap it up tight. Toss the whole contraption back on the grill and cook for 2 hours.
My first question was whether or not bread would even bake at 225 degrees. So I did a little bit of a test run:
Looks pretty good! It doesn't have the dark brown crust it usually does but a little butter and a few seconds above the coals should fix that. So it was on to the real thing. As soon as I bought the fatty outside, the dogs started arguing over who would get to eat it:
Art/dogs imitate life: the girl won.
But when all was said and done, they're back to being best friends:
The fatty went into my Weber OTS equipped with a faux smokenator. One of these days I will have to buy one, because that sucker works like a dream and I feel guilty for blatantly stealing the idea. 60 briquettes and some apple chunks mixed with pecan shells was the fuel for this fire. With all that grill space, it would be such a waste not to toss some ribs on there. So I did!
Three hours later, the fatty was removed:
The dough was flattened out and slathered with a mayonnaise and mustard mix:
And then the fatty was laid down and rolled up into the dough:
1 hour later, the dough wasn't rising like I wanted, so I opened up the vents, stoked the coal, and the temperature shot up to 325ish. Another hour later, and it's perfect:
Yummmmm!!