Wisconsin chef’s game-day appetizer delivers a sweet mix of pork flavor
As we wrap up the holiday party season and move into playoff football season, it’s time to break out a better bacon-wrapped appetizer.
Chef Dan Fisher shares a recipe made with his It Sauce that will have guests pushing past bacon-wrapped stuffed jalapenos for these bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with sausage.
The double dose of pork blitzes your umami taste buds while the dates and maple syrup add a sweet counterbalance. Those flavors get wrapped with smokiness and hints of spicy heat. Fresh herbs release aromatics and provide tiny pops of flavor.
And this is perhaps the easiest bacon-wrapped, stuffed anything dish you will ever make.
Insights
Make sure the dates are pitted to eliminate unnecessary work.
When a recipe uses just a few ingredients, quality matters. In this case, pure maple syrup and thick cut bacon. Bonus points if the bacon is doublesmoked.
To stuff the date, slice it open and wrap it around a pinch of sausage.
Stretch the bacon just before wrapping. Just a little tug before setting it on the cutting board is enough to help it cling to the date without aid of a toothpick. Once you’ve wrapped the date, cut the bacon. You’ll get about three dates per piece of bacon.
If you want more spicy heat, use hot Italian sausage. Regular pork sausage works too. You could even stuff the dates with blue cheese if you don’t want sausage.
It Sauce is sold only in a few retail locations, so you will most likely need to order from it-sauce.com. Otherwise you could use your favorite hot sauce for the spiciness, but you’ll miss the sweetness of the Criolla peppers.
Don’t underestimate how much a few sprinkles of fresh herbs bring to a dish. The aromatics alone are worth that tiny extra effort.
About It Sauce
First available in April, It Sauce was Dan Fisher’s “someday” idea for a hot sauce made with a pepper not named cayenne. Someday came in 2020 when COVID-19 forced restaurants to close indoor dining.
Fisher — who has been cooking since he was 17, is a Le Cordon Bleu culinary school graduate and former chef whose resume includes stints in the kitchens of Hinterland and Three Three Five — was furloughed for four months from his job with a restaurant food supplier company. He used the time to focus on the sauce.
It started with a base sauce that Fisher often used when hired for private catering events. Then he tested the sauce with about a dozen pepper varieties. Criolla peppers won the taste test. Never heard of Criolla peppers? You’re not alone. The medium-heat peppers grown in the Andes Mountains were also new to Fisher.
The hints of citrus and mango sweetness the peppers brought to the sauce won him over. The rarity of the Criolla’s use in American hot sauces — the supplier told Fisher he was the first customer to use this pepper in a hot sauce — made it the perfect pepper as far as Fisher was concerned.
With the flavor perfected, Fisher contracted with Croix Valley Foods in Hudson to produce and bottle the sauce.
Meanwhile, Fisher and his wife, Jacqueline, have been making and photographing and sharing dishes on the website, Facebook and (because it’s food) Instagram accounts.
For those not sure where to start with
this sauce, the De Pere couple have posted about 20 It Sauce recipes on the website, though you can use it like other hot sauces. Just be prepared for a different heat level and flavor than the likes of Frank’s Hot Sauce or Tabasco.
There are more sauces in the works, Fisher said, but growing sales of the It Sauce come first.
Contact Daniel Higgins dphiggin@gannett.com. Follow @HigginsEats on Twitter and Instagram and like on Facebook.