Survival Sunday 240: Full English Fry Up

In which I attempt to make a tasty English Breakfast

I'm not a very well-traveled person. The most exotic locales I've wandered are Nova Scotia (for a day) and Niagara Falls (also for a day). Besides that' it's mostly just been the occasional trip to Boston with my family. I've never left this continent.

So I've never had a true Full English breakfast.

Which means I don't 100% know what's in one.

I just know what I've seen on the internet, and those components seem to me to be:

• Fried Eggs
• Toast
• Beans
• Tomato
• Mushrooms
• Sausage
• Bacon

Sounded simple enough to me! So I set about trying to make a Full English Breakfast, or, as I'll be calling it from here on out, a Fry-Up.

My first step was cutting and frying my sausage. I've never worked with sausage in a tube before, so that was interesting. I was too impatient to let it thaw completely, so my hand-cut patties were... well, the were a mess. Eventually, though, I got them fried up in my big frying pan and started in on my toast. I nicked a couple of English muffins from my bread cupboard for this, but I'd guess any bread product would work.

I used some of the sausage fat to fry up my "toast". It was lightly buttered, too.

Do not attempt this kind of breakfast if you've got cholesterol issues.

Or if you'd like to have a regular digestion for the next few days.

Regardless, I fried up my toast and stuck it on a plate next to the sausage.

Mmmm.... grease :P

All told, though, it looked really good at this point, and I could've easily just scrambled the eggs and served them like this.

A much more glamorous shot of the toast and sausage.

But I'm nuts, so I decided "time to cook" and got to work on that bacon.

Thick, thick bacon.

I also made sure my other ingredients were close to hand:

A couple of eggs for frying later.

I cut the stem out of the tomato.
I also salted the cut portion generously - which was the only salt I used at all!

The mushrooms were inspected and washed juuuuust before I cooked them!

 Then I turned my pan onto the lowest heat and added my bacon!

Moments after adding the bacon to my pan, this happened!

I let the bacon fry until it looked moderately crispy, then set it aside while I cautiously fried the tomato and mushrooms.

And it was a harrowing experience.

See, when you're cooking with grease, the last thing you ever want to introduce to the environment is water. Tomato is about 90% water, by my estimation. The purpose of the salt (and laying the tomato out on paper towels) was to draw some of the water out and to make the tomato as dry as possible. There was every reason to believe that the tomato would cause the hot bacon fat to explode all over me when I added it.

Thankfully, this was not the case, and I let the tomato and mushroom sizzle together for a while until the mushrooms were soft and the tomato skin began to wrinkle and split. I took out the mushrooms, but I let the tomato keep going and flipped it onto its skin, so the skin became slightly blistered and discolored. When I figured it was done, I took it out and immediately added an egg to the pan.

Also mere moments after being added!

I never raised my pan above a "2" - so, I'd strongly suggest leaving your stove low if you're making one of these. Will it take a longer time? Yes. Will you burn foods as much? Absolutely not.

While I had been preparing most of the meal, I'd emptied a small can of baked beans into a pan on a back burner set to the very lowest setting. While I'm aware that a proper English Breakfast uses beans with some sort of tomato sauce, that's not very common where I live, so baked beans it was!

Sausage, Egg, Toast, and beans!

The overall breakfast was incredible. Each element was tasty on its own (except maybe the tomato, but I'm not a huge tomato fan), but together, they became transcendent. The biggest shock for me was probably the tomato itself, since I figured I'd hate it. I was wrong. When I cut it up and ate the small pieces with beans or sausage, it went from just a tomato to a sliver of bright, acid morning in the slick midnight of the greasy sausage and bacon. The acidity actually helped boost the sweetness from the beans, too!

Actually, I'm pretty sure this meal had all of the flavors: sour and bitter from the tomato (tomato seeds are always bitter to me), sweet from the beans, salty from everything, and umami from the meats and egg!

Also, it was so much food that it couldn't fit on two plates!
My dining companion and I each had a plate with egg, sausage, toast and beans
and we put the bacon and veggies on a third! Good heavens...

So if you're looking to enjoy the food of another land, but you don't have the money to do it, I strongly suggest looking at their culture breakfast first!

That being said, I don't know how England still exists if this is what they eat for breakfast. Even if I'd been a sane person and just had two sausage patties and a couple strips of bacon, the sheer volume of food was overwhelming, and I shudder to think what calories I consumed...

It was 10000000% worth it.

Go Enjoy Something!

FC