Smoked Bacon Wrapped Jalapenos with Cream Cheese

Today we’re making a batch of our smoked bacon wrapped jalapenos with cream cheese.

After several cold and rainy days, it was time to get outside, enjoy the blue sky, and light up the grill for some good eats.

These smoked bacon wrapped jalapenos with cream cheese make a great appetizers or as a topping for hot dogs, burgers, or anything else that you might think of coming off the grill.

So, let’s get started …

Smoked Bacon Wrapped Jalapenos with Cream Cheese

Today we’re only making a few of these. Midge is having a girl’s day out, so I am grilling up a mid-day smoked food feast for myself with leftovers for later.

Smoke, peppers, bacon, and cheese, what an appealing combination of bite-size flavors.

We have a couple of extra hotdog like sausages that would a flavorsome and temptingly tasty lunchtime treat for moi.

Tools and Supplies

Mixing bowl

Sharp knife

Fork, spoon

Smoking wood of choice, today we’re using cherry

Want to know more about types of smoking wood? Check out our book, Wood Smoke and Smoking Wood, available only on Amazon.

Ingredients for Smoked Bacon Wrapped Jalapenos with Cream Cheese

You’ll need just a few ingredients, not many.

++ A couple of jalapeno peppers, today, we’ll need two poppers per sausage

++ Shallots to taste, we like the bite, substitute onion if you can’t find shallots

++ Cream cheese, softened, we’re using about 4 ounces for our 4 poppers

++ Bacon, thin slice center cut works best, one slice of bacon per popper

Tip: Look for 3- to 4-inch jalapeno peppers. If your making a bunch, try to keep them all about the same size for even cooking.

Tip: Look at the bacon package. Choose a package that is filled with a uniform cut slab of bacon strips. Some bacon packages might be somewhat wavy and curvy. Don’t buy that for making poppers. Those bacon strips will be hard to peel apart.

The How-To

Stabilize your smoker at 225 °F / 107 °C. We’re setting up our first generation Kamado Joe with the heat deflector and adding the cherry smoking wood.

Wash the jalapeno peppers. I shouldn’t need to say that.

With a sharp knife, cut the jalapeno lengthwise, from the stem to the end. Try to cut right through the stem for a nice presentation. Scoop out the seeds and the membrane with a spoon.

Take that cream cheese out of the cardboard and let warm a bit on the counter for an hour or two to soften.

Dice up a shallot.

Using a small bowl, mix together the softened cream cheese and diced shallot. I find a fork works best.

Scoop out a spoon full the cream cheese and shallot mix, press it into each of the jalapeno pepper half. Don’t level if off. You’ll want a slight heaping of the cream cheese shallot mixture.

Wrap a strip of bacon around the pepper. Slightly overlap the bacon strip as you wrap.

Finally, put the poppers on the smoker. They’ll take about an hour to cook.

After smoking our poppers, we pulled off our Kamado Joe heat deflector with our heat resistant gloves. Need some heat, gotta cook up some sausages.

We like these heavy duty heat resistant gloves, available on Amazon.com. With over 600 customer reviews averaging 4.6 out of 5 stars. You can’t go wrong.

Taste Test for our Smoked Bacon Wrapped Jalapenos with Cream Cheese

We chopped up two of these poppers for each sausage dog.

These were just amazing. These smoked bacon wrapped jalapenos with cream cheese make the perfect topping. Peppery heat. Shallot. Cheese. Bacon. Move over mustard and ketchup. There is a new topping in town.

Check out my other Kamado Joe and JoeTisserie recipes and links here on my Outdoor Eats page.