Relish

We could make a joke about this. It would be so easy. So let’s not -- let’s just have the truth, sitting right there, out in the open, for all to read and absorb. Okay -- you ready?

There will be a bacon festival downtown this spring. It will be called Baconfest St. Louis. At the festival, a group of amateur and professional cooks will make a super-jumbo version of a dish called the Bacon Explosion. It is a mat of basket-woven bacon wrapped around a mix of sausage, barbecue sauce, and more bacon, shaped like a massive torpedo. It will weigh 500 pounds. It will be cooked in a custom smoker designed to accommodate its massive size. It will then be sliced like a meatloaf and consumed.

I know. I know. The mind cannot process the simultaneous righteousness and unholiness of all this. Let’s slow down. Let’s breathe. Deep breaths. Breathe in. Breathe out. Again. Okay. Better now.

Let’s break it down.

Late in 2011, as reported by Ian Froeb of the Riverfront Times, friends Matthew Willer, Matthew Guillot, and some carnivorous hangers-on created and smoked a 120-pound Bacon Explosion (right), believed to be the largest such abomination of its type in existence. You can see some footage of that adventure here, and an earlier video made by the same guys (that riffs on the popular Epic Meal Time videos) of the creation of an eight-pound Bacon Explosion here.

The jaw-dropping centerpiece of Baconfest will be the creation of a 500-pound Bacon Explosion, an obscene meat bomb that will surely warp reality in great, pork-scented waves around Kiener Plaza.

Related fun on the schedule includes 35 vendors offering dishes made with bacon, bacon-infused drinks, bacon-related merchandise, bacon-art activities for kids, beer sales, and live music. Local chefs will vie for the Bacon Battle Award in a cooking contest.

The organizers anticipate a crowd of 10,000 gathering to enjoy “Bacon, Beer, Bacon, Music, and Bacon.”

Okay – you can freak out now. We are.

March 23, 11 a.m. - 9 p.m.
Kiener Plaza
Free admission
baconfeststl.co
On Facebook here and definitely worth a look.