Yes, you can taste the rainbow - Puyallup's Blue Max Meats creates Beast Mode Hot Skittles Sausage

The combination of meat and sweet is not all that unusual when you consider the delicious duos of bacon and syrup or melon and prosciutto.

But smoked sausage and ... Skittles?

Yup. Spicy pork sausage infused with Marshawn Lynch’s favorite sideline treat - Skittles. It’s called Beast Mode Hot Skittles Sausage and it’s an ode to Lynch and the Super Bowl bound Hawks.

It’s the creation of Evan Greco and Tommy Marshall, the duo behind Blue Max Meats in the Summit neighborhood near Puyallup.

How they make the Beast Mode sausage is serious geek-level sausage making mixed up with the pair's playful humor - something of a trademark for the two who are always decked out in bow ties.

The shop is known for using quality, straightforward ingredients and house smoking its meats. They grind their sausage from pork shoulder - a cut of meat that yields just enough of a fat bath during smoking to give Blue Max sausage its signature silky texture.

For the Beast Mode sausage, three pounds of Skittles are added to 25 pounds of spicy pork sausage that's been double ground. The smoking process dissolves the Skittles - there’s essentially no visual trace of the neon-colored candies in the final product.

But can one taste the rainbow when biting off a hunk of the sausage? You bet.

Marshall described the pockets of sweetness infused into the sausage as, “Skittles rivers.”

Greco calls it eating “smoked Fruity Pebbles."

After munching on one of the spicy links, I think that’s a perfect description. It’d be stellar tucked into a stadium roll with a slathering of caramelized sweet onions and a dose of deli mustard. But for straight snacking? It’s still pretty tasty - even for Skittles flavored sausage.

The smoked sausage links sell for $4.99 a pound. It’s made in small batches - about 25 pounds at a time - so the stock may not last. They’ve already sold out once this week.

Marshall and Greco said they’d continue to make Beast Mode sausage up until Super Bowl weekend, so call ahead or keep checking to see if they have any in stock.

Blue Max Meats9512 Canyon Road E., Summit, 253-535-6110, facebook.com/BlueMaxMeats

This story was originally published January 23, 2014 at 6:50 AM with the headline "Yes, you can taste the rainbow - Puyallup's Blue Max Meats creates Beast Mode Hot Skittles Sausage."