Washington, United States—How does a Republican candidate stand out from the other 16? Three days from their first debate, Ted Cruz decided to cook bacon on the barrel of an assault rifle.

Faced with a crowded Republican field and an omnipresent, flame-throwing Donald Trump hogging television cameras' attention, Republicans are running out of ways to draw attention to their candidacies.

In a minute-long video released Monday, the 44-year-old senator from Texas, decided not to address political issues. 

"There are few things I enjoy more than, on weekends, cooking breakfast with the family. Of course in Texas, we cook bacon a little differently than most folks," he said over music that could have been from the opening of an action film.

The video then shows the conservative candidate wrapping a slice of bacon around the barrel of an assault rifle and covering it in aluminium foil before emptying two magazines in a barrage of shots fired at an indoor target.

"There's grease coming down," Cruz declares, satisfied that the gun has gotten hot enough to cook the bacon.

Cruz is not the only Republican to release an odd video ahead of the first televised debate, to be held Thursday.

Senator Rand Paul, to cite just one example, recently tried to grab some attention with a video showing him taking a chainsaw to the 70,000-page US tax code.

At the end of Cruz's video he pries a piece of the bacon from the gun barrel with a plastic fork and eats it. "Machine gun bacon," he says, laughing.