Texans love to stuff jalapeños. The classic version, of course, is the jalapeño popper, in which the pepper is filled with cream cheese and wrapped in bacon—it’s so common you can get poppers premade and ready to grill at many supermarkets. Hutchins Barbeque in McKinney changed the stuffed-jalapeño game more than a decade ago with the Texas Twinkie. Co-owner Dustin Blackwell came up with an ingenious use for leftover smoked brisket by placing it inside a jalapeño with cream cheese and brushing the crisp bacon exterior with barbecue sauce. Then there’s the Texas Torpedo, where the pepper is swathed in sausage instead of bacon. A yeehaw Scotch egg, if you will.
Inspired by Hutchins, I turned to another Texas barbecue staple for my jalapeño poppers: spicy cheddar sausage. The meat stuffing in this recipe is similar in composition to an Italian meatball, but it’s flavored like an old-fashioned Texas hot link, with seasonings like garlic and pepper, and has cubes of cheddar dotted throughout. The chiles are grilled until the bacon has cooked, the cheese has melted, and the filling has been infused with the jalapeño’s mild heat. Of course, it needed a catchy name. I call these Texas Twisters.
You’ll want to select large jalapeños—the more filling you can stuff into them, the better. You could smoke these, although I didn’t test them for that. (I’m too impatient.) Just use the internal temperature of the filling as your guide. They should be done at 160 degrees. This summer, you can find me standing by the grill, tongs in hand, beer cracked, flipping jalapeños.
Texas Twisters, or Hot Link–Stuffed Jalapeño Poppers…