Directions

• Bring cream cheese to room temperature.
• If you use fresh jalapeños, you’ll want to cut off the stem and chop these up. I use the seeds and and veins for more heat but if you want it to be more mild, you can remove the veins and seeds and just chop what’s left.  A couple of small jalapeños or a larger one should do the trick.
• Grade 1 cup of cheese per batch or use pre-grated cheese.
• Slice the sausage between 3/8 and 1/2-inch thick. Slice the bacon in half.  Use bacon that is a little thicker so it’ll hold its shape better. Lay a sausage slice on your cutting board and wrap a half slice of bacon around the perimeter forming a cup.  The sausage is the bottom of the cup. 
  Push a toothpick through the end of the bacon, the sausage and through the bacon on the other side to hold everything in place.
• Place the cream cheese into a small or medium sized bowl and press it out with a fork. Add 1 tablespoon of seasoning of your choice, ½ cup of grated cheese and approximately 2 tablespoons of chopped jalapeños and mix everything up really well.
• At this point, I made “balls” of the cream cheese mixture that were about the width of the sausage slices. You could also place the mixture into a zip top bag with a corner cut off and squeeze the mixture into the cups if you feel that would work better for you. You do not need to fill the cups all the way to the top as the bacon will shrink as it cooks.
• We added a nice bit of seasoning into the cream cheese to give it lots of flavor but it’s also a great idea to give the stuffed appetizers a good sprinkling of the seasoning/rub just before the pig shots go into the smoker.
• Set up your smoker for indirect cooking at about 250-275°F if possible. The thicker bacon will appreciate the higher heat and they’ll get done in about 90 minutes this way. If your smoker will not cook that hot, then just set it up to cook as close to that temperature as you can.
• If your smoker uses a water pan to create an indirect cooking method then fill it up. Otherwise, extra humidity is not really essential in this recipe.
• I used the Camp Chef Woodwind pellet smoker with a pellet blend that contained hickory, cherry and maple. Almost any smoking wood will work great for these.
• Once your smoker is ready, place the pig shots on the smoker grate preferably using a Weber grill pan or similar to make it easy to move them to and from the smoker. Because the Weber grill pans have slots in the bottom which allow the grease to drain off and smoke to get through, you can leave the appetizers on the pan while they cook. Super handy!
• You can expect these to take about 90 minutes if you are able to maintain 250-275°F but you will need to be the judge when the bacon reaches that sweet spot.
• If you do use the oven for these, be sure to place a pan under the pig shots to catch the bacon grease. This keeps the oven clean and prevents grease fires.
• When they are finished cooking and ready to take out of the smoker, feel free to give them a good glaze of barbecue sauce and leave them another 10 minutes in the heat to let it set.
• I used about 1/2 cup of barbecue sauce thinned with a couple tablespoons of apple juice and it was an excellent choice. Bring the pig shots into the house and serve them up right away. They’ll disappear quickly and you’ll probably wish you’d made an extra batch.