Smoked Sausage Burnt Ends

If there is a Nobel Prize for bite-sized bits of pork you can eat off a toothpick, I am going to win it. This recipe was a mere experiment three weeks ago, and that very afternoon I told my girls to get ready, because I was about to be elected Queen of the World. Is there a Tailgating Olympics? If so, I’ll be the one on the top step, all bouncy and smiling and waving.

I didn’t dream this method up. I saw Susie Bulloch, BBQ maven extraordinaire and owner of the awesome website heygrillhey.com make it with cut up hotdogs on Food Network. She used an outdoor smoker. It seemed interesting, but a lot of trouble for some hotdogs. The idea hung around in the back of my mind for a couple of days.

Several days later I’m dealing with the stuff in the fridge. My life is such that I have a refrigerator that must be DEALT WITH on a regular basis. Half jars of condiments and pickles, leftovers, odds and ends from catering jobs, etc. Anyway, there it was: an unopened pound of Conecuh sausage that I’d taken out of the freezer earlier in the week, and then didn’t use because life zigged or zagged in a way I hadn’t seen coming.

Our local crowd already knows all about Conecuh sausage. It’s a regional favorite, a sausage made just up I-65 from here. On the Gulf Coast we like spice and a lot of smoke flavor in our sausage, and Conecuh brings both. We certainly don’t waste it by letting it outdate for no good reason. Clearly the BBQ gods wanted me to make Smoked Sausage Burnt Ends with that sausage, and I can take a hint. While Susie put her hotdogs in the smoker, no such preparation was necessary here. My sausage was already smoked, making these burnt ends super easy to do in the oven. (If you can’t get your hands on Conecuh, any spicy smoked sausage will work.)

Susie B. also finished her burnt ends with a Kansas City-style BBQ sauce. (Sweet Baby Ray’s, KC Masterpiece, etc.) I did too the first time, and they were delicious. The batch pictured here was finished with another local favorite, though: Shube Sauce. Shube Sauce is made by my friends Rob and Brady Berglin right here in town. Shube Sauce is a tawny-colored, tangy sweet and spicy sauce that’s so good you can put it on anything at all. I highly recommend it, and I see it’s even available on Amazon in a pinch.

Don’t be afraid of the yellow mustard in this recipe. It’s just a glue to make the BBQ rub stick, and I can’t taste it in the finished dish. If you don’t have any BBQ dry rub lying around, I have an easy recipe for a quick dry rub on Overnight Pulled Pork, and also on Bacon-Wrapped Drumsticks. It’s versatile!

RTR!