Grilled Sriracha Candied Bacon Wrapped Pineapple

These past few weeks we’ve been a major fresh pineapple kick. Now living where we live I have zero clue when pineapple ‘season’ is at its peak considering we are more known for apples, vegetables and butt-cold Pittsburgh mornings with snow in the middle of April. Oops, sorry my irritation towards Mother Nature got the best of me. But seriously 13 degrees with snow in the middle of April?  C’mon on now lady – get your act together!  I mean it’s bad enough the Easter Bunny and Santa are having a cage match on my front lawn over who’s turn is next to bring me presents!  LOL

Anyway as I was saying I was literally buying 1-2 fresh pineapples a week. Normally I’d just cut the top off and sides, remove the core and chunk it up.  Then we’d fight over it.  It got to the point that I made “His” and “Hers” bowls of them (with masking tape on the outside) because he would eat almost the entire bowl in 2 days.  Somehow my ‘Hers’ bowl was getting depleted a lot faster than ‘His’ bowl.  When I questioned my sexy fantabulous husband his response was, through batted eyes “Baby what’s yours is mine and what’s mine is mine…”

*shakes her head*  LOL  Gotta love that man!

Eventually we both got tired of eating it plain; I mean after 2 weeks of straight pineapple you want it with something else. So I got to adding it on pizzas (it’s AMAZING on a white pizza with caramelized onions, roasted asparagus and shaved ham!!!), cutting it up into a chutney for chicken with some jalapenos, cilantro and shallots to just adding it to coconut cupcakes.

Well it was around the same time Mr.Fantabulous was having his birthday as well as the lead singer of their band so us wives got together to make a big buffet for their practice.  Since I had an abundance of fresh pineapple I wanted to make something different to take with it. So I decided to make it into an appetizer and wrap bacon around it.  Now if you’ve never had it, it’s AMAZING! You can grill it (like I show you here), or bake it in the oven on a cooling rack/baking sheet. Most of the times when I make it for a party I cube the pineapple, wrap bacon around it and hold it with a skewer and cook it.  This way all folks have to do is grab the skewer, pop the deliciousness in their mouth and discard the toothpick.

However you know me, I wanted to do this a bit different; change it up.  Instead of skewering it and making cutsie little appetizers (trust me, these boys play rock and metal and the last thing they want are these cute little things – they want food that they can shove in their mouth as fast as possible with no obstacles; i.e., toothpick!). Therefore when I cut the pineapple, I make it into 1″ thick spears about 3-4″ long.  And instead of just wrapping plain bacon around it, I opted to candy it.  Since my Sriracha Spiced Man Candy II is one of my highest requested recipes, I knew this was the way to go. Knowing that heat from the Sriracha, the sweetness from the brown sugar and the tartness of that fresh pineapple – yeah we’re talking perfect marriage!

I whipped up the brown sugar mixture into more of a ‘wet sand’ consistency. It was just barely moist to the touch but moist enough to stick to the bacon.  I cut the bacon in half, dredged the bacon in the Sriracha mixture and wrapped the bacon around.  Now my best advice to you is when you wrap this, twist it like how a candy cane is; moving up towards the other end slightly overlapping itself.  The key to this is to get both ends of the bacon on the same side of the pineapple.  However if you can’t (and this happened to me) just have a few soaked wooden toothpicks of metal skewers to hold the ends down.

Now any good cook always makes a test batch when testing out a new recipe.  You almost never go full-blown full dish because what if it ends up being crappy?  Trust me this has happened many times in my kitchen.  Thus I made just 4 of these skewers to make sure I had enough sugar, Sriracha, etc…  Folks I could have kicked myself in the butt for not making a full batch as a ‘test’ batch as these were AMAZING!  And the fact that I HAD to wait another 6-10 minutes to cook these was pure torture!  But I managed to suffer through the wait however I forgot one thing… these were for the party; I couldn’t eat them all.  I mean that would be wrong, ….right?

<insert wicked grin>

Okay fine I’ll confess the full-blown batch MAY  not have made it to the party as it  MAY have been a few shy on the serving platter.  I couldn’t help myself folks.  These things are fanfriggentastic!  I mean you don’t understand!  But I’m sure you will once you make these.  And oh yes, with Spring (dear God let it stay warm now) here and cook out season kicking off, you WILL make these and you WILL not want to share.  Trust me on this when I say all that crap you learned in pre-school and kindergarten about sharing… Pfft!  I’m all about the ‘Get your own buddy, these are mine!’ LOL  Okay fine share but make 2 batches… 1 1/2 batches for you and 1/2 for your guests.  Wha???  I didn’t say HOW MUCH TO SHARE!!!    tee hee

Grilled Sriracha Candied Bacon Wrapped Pineapple

• Author: The Kitchen Whisperer

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Ingredients

• 24 3-4” spears of fresh pineapple (about 1/2” thick)
• 12 strips of bacon (regular or thick cut), cut in half
• 1 1/2 cups brown sugar
• 2 tablespoon Sriracha sauce
• metal or wooden skewers (soaked for 30 minutes in water) – optional

Instructions

1. Build a medium-low fire in a charcoal grill, or heat a gas grill to medium.
2. Brush grate with oil.
3. In a bowl mix together your brown sugar and Sriracha. It should be slightly damp but not wet.
4. Place in a pie dish.
5. Dredge your bacon in brown sugar coating both sides.
6. Starting at the bottom of the pineapple spear, twist the bacon up spear to the end of the pineapple. You want to wrap it up the pineapple so it’s slightly overlapping. *IMPORTANT: be sure to get the ends of the bacon on the same sides. If you can’t the skewer each end of the bacon down.
7. Place the bacon, end side facing down on the grate.
8. Grill turning often so each side is slightly rendered, crispy and charred in spots, about 6-8 minutes (longer if using thick cut bacon).
9. Plate, remove skewers and enjoy!

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