Armadillo Eggs

hey everybody i'm chef tom with atbbq.com and this is armadillo eggs now the armadillo egg if you're not familiar is essentially just a jalapeno pepper that's been stuffed full of cheese encased in sausage and wrapped in bacon it's one of these great smoked barbecue snacks up there with the sausage fatty or the atomic buffalo turd if you don't know those you got to google those as well now the armadillo egg does get glazed with a bit of barbecue sauce at the end of the smoke but i feel like another great addition something great for dipping your armadillo eggs into is a ranch dressing and i like to do this from scratch so that's what we're going to start with today is our southwest ranch dressing so we're going to start off with equal parts a half cup each of sour cream and mayo we're going to add to that some fresh herbs got a quarter cup of minced parsley a quarter cup of cilantro a tablespoon of dill a tablespoon of chives and then we're going to hit this with a little bit of garlic just one clove either minced super fine or grated up and now where i would normally use a little vinegar in a buttermilk ranch dressing what we're going to do today is some lime juice since we're doing kind of a southwest buttermilk ranch dressing anyway i'm going to take the zest off first about half of this lime and then we're going to juice about half of this lime the zest is such a potent aromatic that it's a great little thing to add add so much more than just the juice by itself and then down to the seasonings now we're going to add a quarter teaspoon of some smoked paprika we get a quarter teaspoon of our habanero infused sea salt and a quarter teaspoon of some black pepper now from here i'll add my buttermilk i've got about three tablespoons i may want to go that thin i may not want to go quite that thin i always recommend just adding a little bit check the consistency and see if you want it thick or thinner i feel like that is a little bit thick maybe we could probably thin it out just a touch more but like i said you're going to use probably two to four tablespoons of buttermilk to adjust the consistency get a little taste oh man that's great it's got great tang to it despite it being very creamy got a nice balance of tanginess and all those fresh herbs all right let's move on to the armadillo x so we're going to start by prepping our jalapenos we're just going to take the tops off of them and then we're going to take all of the seeds and pith out of the center if you've got one of these handy dandy tools that are designed for it that's great otherwise you can just use a paring knife to kind of scrape out the inside but we want to get that fully hollowed out so that we can stuff it full of cheese all right last one here we're getting this cord out at this point we're going to be ready to put our cheese stuffing in the middle so let's go ahead and mix that up now for the cheese filling we're going to start with 8 ounces of cream cheese we're going to combine all of this in a zip top bag because we're going to later use this bag as a piping bag the easiest way to get all of this filling into these peppers next we've got four ounces of sharp cheddar also going to add about a quarter cup of our southwest southwest ranch that we made earlier and then a little bit of barbecue rub and today we're using the honey chipotle from our butts are smoking it's about a teaspoon or two so go ahead and close this up give it a good mix all right so squeeze this all to one corner i'll take that corner off and then we're gonna pipe this right into our peppers fill it to the top move on alright last one now at this point we're just going to transfer these over to our sheet pan we'll go ahead and throw these in the fridge while we prepare the sausage now typically in this recipe you're going to find sausage wrapped around the jalapeno i've also used brisket in the past which is really nice like a ground brisket but being that this is kind of a texas staple i'm thinking today we go ahead and work some chorizo into it to kind of get that whole southwest tex-mex thing so we're actually going to use a blend of two parts just pork sausage and one part chorizo today so got a two pound chub of pork sausage we're gonna put this into our bowl of our stand mixer this is just gonna be to help bring the chorizo and the pork sausage together to make sure that we don't have like kind of splotchy spots especially being that the pork chorizo tends to have a little bit higher moisture content to it so it would cook unevenly if we didn't make sure it was mixed together really well we'll go ahead and put this over medium speed we're just going to whip it with that paddle attachment probably for about a minute until everything's well incorporated see that's looking pretty good so now that we've got this all mixed up i'm just going to scale these out into roughly four ounce portions if you want to just eyeball this part you totally can but i just want to make sure it's pretty even most of our peppers are roughly the same size and i know that we've got just the right amount of sausage here to do a dozen or so four ounce portions all right last one here i'm gonna steal just a little bit from these other ones as you can see this sausage is getting pretty soft it's about a hundred degrees out here in kansas today so at this point we gotta let this stuff chill down before we can work with it once again otherwise we're going to be in trouble so we're going to move all of our sausage back to the refrigerator to chill so now that everything's had a chance to chill down we're going to go ahead and wrap all these peppers in the sausage wrap the sausage in the bacon so kind of just pat this out place our pepper in the middle and then wrap it around make sure it gets fully enclosed especially up there at the top where you got that cheese that's going to start getting oozy as it cooks and just try and get a nice even layer of sausage around the pepper so closing up the last one now and if you can't tell how sticky this sausage is this kansas heat's really fighting us today so once again we're gonna chill these down before we get them wrapped up in bacon before we can get them on the grill all right we've got these chilled down to a workable state now so we're going to do now is wrap our bacon around them we're going to take two slices for each one of these since they're pretty big portions just overlap by a little bit and that way we get the entire thing covered just like that and we're just kind of overlapping making sure that we cover all of our armadillo egg here wrap the rest underneath today we're smoking on the odor smokers ys640s pellet grill running at 275 degrees with hickory pellets so we're going to load these onto the second shelf in a true indirect smoke today give them a little bit of space in between so that that smoke can kind of fully surround each one of these armadillo eggs in fact we're going to keep it kind of well pretty much the same way it was here on the sheet pan that way we can actually put this pan as the grease starts to really melt and drip out of this bacon and out of this sausage you can get a lot of smoke going on and not necessarily the good kind so we're going to put that underneath there with a little bit of water in it and that way any fat that falls down just falls down into the water pan well guys it's been about an hour and a half now that our armadillo eggs have been smoking we've reached about 160 degrees on the deepest part of the internal temperature and that's what we're going for 160. come and take a look we'll kind of check out how this bacon's rendered out we want to get them glazed up with a little bit of sauce at the same time now you can see that great color that we've got the bacon's really rendered out it's going to have a nice bite through texture to it so at this point we're going to glaze this with a little bit of sauce we've got the big rick's chipotle barbecue sauce seem to appropriate with everything else that's going on the chipotle will work really nice with the jalapeno kind of with our southwest ranch as well and we've managed to keep the smoke really clean in here by using that water pan underneath so we don't have essentially a grease fire going on down there on the plate that water pan will kind of elongate the cook time a little bit probably could have got this done closer to an hour had we not put that in there just that extra moisture takes that extra time but it's going to give us a really nice end result now these really don't need to stay in here much longer this also kind of tack up on its own from the residual heat coming off that bacon so we'll go ahead and pull these off the grill right now got to be gentle i lost the top of that one all right let's get these back to the table so we can get a taste so we're plating up the last of our armadillo eggs go ahead and get our southwest buttermilk ranch dressing out i'm going to cut into one of these and have a taste oh yeah check that out that ooey gooey in there that looks delicious let's have a little taste my goodness that ranch dressing with the sausage with the jalapeno man the jalapenos still got bite to it i love that it's not mushy it's got some texture ooey gooey on the inside picking up on that chorizo chorizo with just a little bit of sweetness from the barbecue sauce mixed with that tangy ranch and there's a lot going on there but i'm digging all of it this is one of those barbecue recipes that's a hit it's gone viral for a reason because there's so many things you can do with this i mean you never have to repeat the same recipe and get a new result every time and that's something exciting it's something to figure out on your own what flavors do you want to put in there you're not going to go wrong well thank you guys so much for watching be sure to check out atbbq.com for all the products featured in today's video if you enjoy the recipe hit that subscribe button and if you have any questions or comments or there's anything you'd like to see me cook let me know in the comment section down below and let's be good to one another for more recipes tips and techniques head over to atbbq.com thesauce all things barbecue where barbecue legends are made

Channel: allthingsbbq

Views: 81,038

Rating: 4.9577298 out of 5

Keywords: atbbq, allthingsbbq, all things bbq, all things barbecue, bbq, barbecue, sausage, chorizo, bacon, wrapped, stuffed, jalapeño, pepper, cream cheese, cheese, cheddar, bbq sauce, sauce, rub, chef tom, the sauce, yoder smokers, yoder, ys640, ys640s, pellet grill, grill, grilling, smoke, smoked, smoking, smoker, pellets, appetizer

Id: MSnIgh2earc

Length: 12min 30sec (750 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021