Now that April Fool’s Day is over with we can finally get back to business! I ate a LOT of Reuben sandwiches on and leading up to Saint Patrick’s Day this year. After it was over I was actually pretty sick of them. The problem though is that I still had half a loaf rye bread sitting at home on my counter and some Swiss cheese, Thousand Island dressing and sauerkraut in my refrigerator.

Now, I’ve never been one to waste food, so I wasn’t just going to throw all those leftovers away. Instead, I swapped out the corned beef that you normally find in Reuben sandwiches with the one thing that I always have on hand — bacon!

As I recently figured out when I used bacon instead of tortilla chips while making nachos, bacon makes a great substitute for pretty much anything, and with this Reuben it was no different! Yeah, I know, I could have used turkey instead of corned beef like some restaurants do, but I didn’t have any of that on hand either. Plus, for as much as I like turkey if the choice is there between that and bacon I’m going to pick bacon pretty much every single time.

Overall my Bacon Reuben was pretty amazing. I wouldn’t necessarily choose it over a traditional Reuben in most cases, but when you’re sick of corned beef it’s clearly the next best thing.

Ever since trying poutine for the first time a couple years ago I’ve been hooked on it. It still amazes me that a dish consisting of French fries topped with cheese curds and gravy isn’t more popular here in Wisconsin where you can find cheese curds pretty much anywhere, but at the very least I’m happy to have finally discovered it.

Previously here on DudeFoods I’ve made deep fried poutine, a poutine burger and most recently, a poutine grilled cheese sandwich. My newest foray into the world of this amazing Canadian dish is poutine pizza.

I started off with a pre-made pizza crust, spread brown gravy over it and topped it with white Cheddar cheese curds and French fries. After cooking the pizza in my over at 450° for ten minutes the cheese curds were melted and the French fries were nice and crispy. I finished it all off by drizzling a little more gravy on top of the pizza.

As I mentioned when I made my poutine grilled cheese, I love the consistency of melted cheese curds. The poutine pizza was delicious, but more importantly, after eating it I realized that I actually prefer melted cheese curds on my pizza crust to the normal melted mozzarella cheese that most pizza has. In fact, when it comes to homemade pizza I’m not sure if I can ever go back to regular melted cheese again!

Last month I came up with the idea for a grilled cheese sandwich that was made completely out of cheese. I absolutely loved it, but it’s always tough guessing how other people will react to the ridiculous stuff I make.

In this case though it appears that everyone else that saw the sandwich approved of it as well, as stories about it started popping up all over the place on sties like Boing Boing, Reddit, Foodbeast, The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and more. Culture Magazine and Bon Appétit Magazine even wrote about it. Clearly some sort of follow-up creation was necessary….

My original plan for the sequel was to make a bacon cheeseburger that used two of my 100% cheese grilled cheese sandwiches as the bun — something similar to the Clock Stopper Burger that I wrote about back in 2011. Carr Valley Cheese Company was even nice enough to send me some more of their bread cheese to help make my dream a reality. Then, that same day, I received an email from another Wisconsin cheesemaker named named Joe, who works for Brunkow Cheese. Joe offered to send me some of their bread cheese, and when I saw that they produced a variety that incorporated smoked bacon into the cheese there was no way I could refuse.

Since I now had bread cheese from two separate companies to use as part of my bacon cheeseburger I obviously had only one option — use them both, turn it into a double cheeseburger and add a third grilled cheese sandwich in the middle! A few days later my second box of cheese arrived and I got to work creating the Bread Cheese Bacon Double Cheeseburger.

For the top and bottom grilled cheese sandwiches I used the smoked bacon bread cheese — or Brun-uusto as they call it — from Brunkow Cheese. The middle grilled cheese once again consisted of the same Carr Valley bread cheese that I used for my original sandwich. Rounding things out were two 1/3 pound ground beef patties — also topped with cheese — and a total of six slices of bacon. I’m not sure exactly how much my burger actually weighed, but after holding it with one hand for a couple minutes as I snapped some pictures my wrist actually started to hurt.

After I was done eating my burger — which was completely amazing in case you were wondering — I was talking to my buddy Curt and he decided to add up the amount of calories in it, which according to his calculations is 4,300. Upon hearing that I immediately came up with the genius idea of heading to the gym to start burning some of them off. I don’t know what exactly the burger did to my body, but I was already sweating before I even got there. After 15 minutes on the treadmill I was an absolute mess…. If you ever eat a 4,300 calorie cheeseburger DO NOT go to the gym immediately afterwards. This may be common sense for most of you, but apparently for me it isn’t. The burger was still totally worth it though.

Oh yeah, and as if my Bread Cheese Bacon Double Cheeseburger wasn’t enough, check out all the cheese I’ve got left, including jalapeño, garlic and chipotle flavored bread cheese from Carr Valley and jalapeño, garlic and pizza style from Brunkow! This pretty much ensures that you can look forward to even more bread cheese related posts. Brunkow actually has a booth at Lollapalooza each year where they skewer, sear and serve up their bread cheese after drizzling it with condiments, so maybe I can convince them to share a few of their recipes with you guys.