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Saturday, October 4, 2014

The Loaded Breakfast Muffin


The best way to start tackling a bastard of a hangover is quite obviously with breakfast, regardless of the time of day you get around to consuming it. I'm fond of a good breakfast sandwich. And by good I obviously mean full of absolute shite.
The filled breakfast muffin is a popular item in the U.S and has been brought to a certain level of worldwide acclaim/notoriety/indifference by the mega stars of the fast food industry... If you like your eggs delivered in a shape and texture similar to that of an empty tin of shoe polish stick to the big lads. I, on the other hand, like to take the best parts of their breakfast and combine it with the best parts of ours.


Obviously while a lot of the sandwiches I make are influenced by my own hangover or with the average hangover sufferer in mind and thus it's generally accepted that they'd be consumed while alone in a darkened room it's perfectly acceptable to eat them in the company of friends and family.
Not this mess though.
Please assure that you are utterly alone should you ever plan to eat one of these.
My quest to find a bread that will contain the contents of this boxset of arterial damnation adequately so that it doesn't shatter under the weight of its own depravity without sacrificing on overall taste continues... I will always prioritise the quality (I mean taste) of food over the ability to consume it with dignity in the company of others. This lad is gonna disintegrate in your hands and you'll have to accept that you're gonna be sucking melted cheese mixed with rasher juice and egg yolk off each and every one of your glistening knuckles.

I've done a fairly significant amount of research into the subtleties and nuances of the perfect breakfast sandwich, so much so that I probably don't need to worry too much about saving into a pension account, and what I quickly realised is that this is an arena with many possibilities and no outright winner. Feel free, obviously says you, to change or add anything should you attempt this sandwich, this is merely one of my favourites. One word of warning though, I'll explain more later and it'll sound quite unusual coming from me: "Don't triple the cheese".


The ingredients of this particular equation are:
  • A Breakfast Muffin
  • 2 Slices of Processed Cheese
  • 2 Sausages (plain ones, nothing fancy)
  • 1 Rasher
  • 3 Hash Browns (small)
  • 1 Egg
  • 2 Thin Slices of White Pudding
Two notable absentees from the list are Black Pudding and any sauce. While I like black pudding in a fry up or in the odd breakfast roll, I find it has too strong and overpowering a flavour for the majority of breakfast sandwiches. There's no sauce because cheese is my sauce, baby.      


I'll presume that it is within your capabilities to fry up these few bits. (The hash browns are in doing a bit of time in the oven)

Pull the muffin apart with your hands instead of cutting it, it makes for a much nicer toast.


Now I'm not saying you have to but if you felt the need after you'd toasted your muffin to sit both sides face down in the hot frying pan so they soaked up the grease and flavours from the rasher, sausages and pudding that have recently been cooked there, I for one certainly wouldn't judge you.

Now that everything is cooked we face the difficult part... The Assembly...

I'm not currently in possession of a degree in engineering but I doubt it would make much difference to the structural integrity of this sandwich if I was. This is not staying together for long. You really need to build quick and eat even quicker... The cheese I used here being a double edged sword... For the first 30 to 60 seconds, while the cheese is in the first phase of it's melt, it'll act like a glue. Any longer than this (as it approaches its near perfect liquid phase) and it'll only serve to lubricate the constituents of the sandwich and they'll slide apart. I mentioned earlier about not tripling the cheese; This sandwich looks to me anyway, like it could handle more cheese. It can't. I've made these with 3 slices and that much just distracts from all the pig meat you should be savouring equally. That and the fact that the particular budget priced fast melting brand I use state on the packaging that each slice is only 48% cheese. Not that I worry too much about that side of things but... 48%?!


 Right, on with the building. After I'd toasted and grease soaked my muffin I went with a sturdy base of hash browns, a slice of 48%, the sausage and then a rasher...


On top of that went a fried egg (this is actually one of my better looking fried eggs), another slice of glue and finally the white pudding before I closed it up...


I don't know if this strikes you as a thing of beauty but for me it doesn't get any better. The melted cheese clinging onto the egg white giving it a purpose in life, the egg yolk mixing with the white pudding, the delicious but massively underrated combination of sausage and hash brown doing their own little cheesey dance all the while the rasher is in the middle just being an absolute rasher... And then after one bite it all falls apart to shite... It matters not a jot though, just get stuck in with your two hands, and hopefully, if you've taken my advice, nobody is watching.
Now I ate this yesterday and, admittedly, though I don't feel great now I'll put that down to the fact that apart from 4 pints, a few cans and an off license impulse purchase of something vaguely apple flavoured called a "Nutron"* this was the sole nutrition to enter my body in the last 24 hours.

*I have it on good authority that the 'Nutr' in "Nutron" has fuck all to do with Nutrition.

Anyway, chance it, the sandwich, not the test tube yoke, just maybe eat an actual apple or something later on...

- Boozey Swine

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