A Bacon Egg and Cheese Sandwich

1. Introduction

I love bacon egg & cheese sandwiches. I must eat at least 3 of them a week. I’m not sure if that renders me particularly qualified to write about them though. It’s like the wrong-colored spot on my house that I meant to paint way back when but I hardly even notice anymore. It’s like a building you walk past every day and never notice until it’s torn down. It’s like how most automobile accidents occur near the home. Familiarity breeds autopilot. Bacon egg & cheese sandwiches have become a part of my landscape, and sometimes easy to overlook.

My typical bacon egg & cheese sandwich is one that I make at home, more likely than not 3 slices of bacon, one egg over-easy, and American or Cheddar cheese on wheat toast. But pretty much any bacon egg & cheese sandwich is a good one, and you can do a wild number of variations. I like them on just about any sliced bread product. I like them on English Muffins. I like them on biscuits & bagels & baguettes, oh my! I like to wrap bacon & egg & cheese in a pita, or a tortilla, or a paratha, though we’re getting into realms of questionable sandwichness. I’ll take the eggs fried over easy, or scrambled, poached, nuked (though this is not my favorite) or I’ll just slap a cheese & bacon omelet between two pieces of buttered toast and have at it. And I’ll use any old cheese I have on hand, from the ever-present sharp cheddar to Provolone, Swiss, Muenster, mozz, even a port wine spread if I think it’ll taste good (PROTIP: It does).

A word about bacon: here is where the crazy tilt-a-whirl stops, the rock meets the hard place and all that flexibility ends. “Bacon” doesn’t mean nitrate-free bacon. It doesn’t mean turkey bacon. It doesn’t mean Canadian bacon. It means good old-fashioned ‘Murican bacon–pork belly, fatty as hell, cured with nitrates, salt and sugar, smoked, sliced and pan fried. Some people bake it, some people nuke it, some people, god bless ’em, batter and deep-fry it but I doubt I could get through three sandwiches a week of that. I may be buying cheap grocery store bacon that’s probably had the cure and the smoke flavor both injected into the meat most of the time–though sometimes I’ll go for something a little fancier–but the belly fat is there, the nitrates are there, the smoky flavor is there, and I’m cooking that bacon in a cast iron griddle.

Other than that one fixed point, the BEC is all about options. I like an over-medium egg with bacon & American cheese on a jalapeno bagel, when the grillman heats the bagel on the grill and it gets all greasy, and I put a little Louisiana hot sauce in the sandwich to liven it up. I like the “Jamon con Huevos” from the Cuban place, with bacon instead of ham and just about any cheese, eggs all scrambled and stuffed in the Cuban bread and pressed to full cheesemeltiness with a Cuban espresso drink on the side. I like to replace the cheese on my homemade sandwich with kimchi, though I guess that technically takes this out of BEC territory (but try it sometime anyway, it’s fantastic).

Half, maybe even most of the time I eat them plain–but not always. I like to add caramelized onions, roasted tomatoes, giardiniera, barbecue sauce, a variety of hot sauces, peach preserves, garlic chutney, pico de gallo, or even maple syrup, though usually not all at once. Hell, some people like to put mayonnaise on them & I’ve been known to use a spicy Cajun remoulade too. It’s a big wide world of bacon egg & cheese sandwiches and few of us ever see more than our own tiny corner of it.

So pretty much any day of the week I could have taken a photo of my normal everyday breakfast and posted it and been done. But this is the Sandwich Tribunal, not the Sandwich Don’t-Try-bunal Of Shit-Easy Posts That Suck Ass, and dammit I’m gonna do something different.

2. The Plan

Home-cured, home-smoked bacon, 2 eggs scrambled in a double-boiler and some kind of halfway decent cheese, on a split homemade baguette. Extra ingredients optional, to be decided. Giardiniera likely.

3. The Bacon

A bit over a week ago, I removed the rind from a section of pork belly resulting in a 2lbs 10oz slab, and I made a Ruhlman-ratio cure with kosher salt, brown sugar, and Instacure #1. I added some crushed black pepper, bay leaves, garlic, and juniper berries. (Let me give you some advice though. When Ruhlman & Polcyn say in Charcuterie that for slices of bacon you should double up on sugar rather than going herb crazy (top of page 42), you should listen. I almost always make this mistake. The bacon is great but that extra touch of sweetness would make it so much better.)

I used just over a 1/4 cup of cure for this amount of meat, which seems skimpy when you’re trying to cover the surface with the cure, but you can always add more. It’s tougher (though still doable) to fix bacon that’s too salty. In any case, the dry cure here is not a “more=better” situation. You want enough to cover but not enough to drown.

3a. Intermission #1: Tacos

This belly cured for a week. I spent that week drinking beers and eating tacos.

Taco Thursday at Five Rabbit Brewery!

After the curing period, I rinsed any remaining cure residue from the meat and “hung” it–I don’t actually have any bacon hangers so I just put it on a rack–in my beer fridge for a day and a half to let it dry and form a pellicle.

Yesterday morning I was working from home so it was a good opportunity to go ahead and smoke the belly. I compounded my “savory bacon” sin by rubbing it with a mixture of black pepper and coriander seed, as I’ve been jonesing for pastrami and I figured why not?

My main smoker is on its last legs so I went the indirect-heat-on-the-grill route with my (also on its last legs) propane grill, lighting the burners on one side and putting the bacon on the other. I also added a maze-type smoker full of cherry wood pellets directly under the belly to give it that smoky goodness.

3b. Intermission #2: An ordinary bacon egg & cheese sandwich

By this time I’d been awake and working for a couple of hours and I was getting hungry, so I made myself a bacon egg and cheese sandwich for breakfast. Cheapo store-bought bacon, one egg over-easy, sharp white cheddar, on toasted squishy white bread.

This is not the *real* bacon egg and cheese sandwich

After two and a half or three hours the bacon was up to temperature and ready to come off the grill to be wrapped up in foil for later.

4. The Bread

OK, bacon’s smoked and ready to slice. Next step is the bread.

4a. Intermission #3: Chipotle

But first, I had some errands to run and I had lunch with Mindy. We are two grown-ass American adults in the Midwest and this was the first time either of us had been to a Chipotle. Here is something I learned about Chipotle: If you tell them to put everything in the burrito, they will put everything in the burrito, and you will end up with one sloppy ass falling-apart burrito. You will embarrass your wife in the restaurant and bring great shame to your family. You have been warned.

I have no photograph of the Chipotle burrito. You’ve all seen them before.

When it comes to baking bread, I’ve had a few decent successes but I am no expert. Minimal and shoddy research suggests that there is no consensus on all purpose flour vs bread flour when it comes to baking baguettes. Which is good, since I only had about a cup of bread flour. So I used a 3:1 ratio of AP to bread flour and hoped for the best. I bloomed some yeast with tepid water and honey until it bubbled like a bastard

I got out ye olde trusty stand mixer and ye olde trusty dough hook and added my hybrid Frankenflour along with some salt.

Then I added the yeast mixture and some more tepid water and let that dough hook beat hell out of the stuff for a few minutes. I let the dough rise for a while, covered in an oiled bowl. After an hour or two, it blew up like a balloon (or like a whole bunch of tiny little balloons made of gluten, I guess). Then I split the dough in half–I eyeballed it, which doesn’t work as well as you’d think, and I ended up with one loaf that was too long for the pan and the other a bit on the short side. I cut the long one in half and left my 3 uneven loaves to proof. Some people score the loaves before the proofing, some after. I’m agnostic on the matter but I did it before this time.

4b. Intermission #4: Italian Beef

‘Round about this time, I took a break to eat dinner, which was Italian Beef sandwiches with potato chips. Reheated frozen Italian beef from a tub, but tasty enough. When we make them at home, we toast the rolls in the oven with garlic butter and some Provolone. A non-canonical modification of course but damn if it doesn’t turn out good that way.

mmm Italian beef. mmm giardiniera

After 25-30 minutes of proofing the loaves while stuffing my face, they were ready to go into a 450° F oven. I put some ice in a bread pan underneath to make some steam, then sat around smelling bread bake. I pulled the steam pan after about 10 minutes and let it go for another 8. By this time I’d basically lost any decent light for a photograph so here’s what you get.

By that time I’d had a decent breakfast, a too-damn-big burrito for lunch, and a satisfying dinner. Also I snacked on an orange at one point. I couldn’t eat another bite, so the Bacon Egg & Cheese sandwich would have to wait for breakfast. Which, really is the best time to eat one anyway.

 4c. Intermission #5: Sleep

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

5. Slicing the bacon

I was up early–damned early, so early that if I’d looked outside at that moment I probably could have seen many of my neighbors already on their way to work. Early is relative I guess. I pulled the bacon out of the fridge and cut off a few thick slices. These went into a cast iron skillet already well-lubricated with yesterday’s bacon grease.

6. Toasting the bread

I cut off a piece of the big baguette, split it, buttered the halves and toasted them outside on the grill.

7. Cooking the eggs

Normally I scramble eggs in a skillet but if we’re getting cheffy with the rest of it, let’s get cheffy with the eggs too. I whisked 2 eggs in a bowl, diced up a pat of butter, and set the double boiler up. This process demands basically all your attention, so I don’t have any pictures, but essentially I slid the whisked eggs into the top of the double boiler and stirred constantly with a spatula, scraping the sides and bottom frequently, for a couple of minutes, popping a little cube of butter in every few seconds, until they were just about set. I spread the resulting egg goo over the bottom half of the baguette

8. The cheese

I guess I could have made my own cheese for this, if I’d planned far enough ahead. The furthest I’ve gotten in cheesemaking is ricotta & paneer type fresh cheeses, and they’re good in a lasagna or a curry, but for this I’d need something a little more complicated, so I decided to go with something from the store. I mean, hell, I didn’t make the eggs either did I?

This morning in my refrigerator, I had the following cheeses to choose from

• American
• Sharp Cheddar (yellow)
• Sharp Cheddar (white)
• Horseradish Cheddar
• Provolone
• Muenster
• Havarti
• Brie
• Parmesan

I was looking for something nice and melty, without so much flavor that it would run over the bacon and eggs and bread. I toyed with the idea of brie, but havarti is where I ended up. I sliced some up and quickly melted it under the broiler.

9. Eating the sandwich

By this time, I felt like I’d waited long enough and I didn’t even bother adding anything to the sandwich before tearing into it. And how was it? The flavors were there but the bread, oh man the bread, the sheer hubris of me thinking I could make a great baguette. Meat is what I work with mostly, meat and beer, not flour and water. The dough looked like it had risen, and the bread looked fine, tasted fine. It would be good sliced, toasted, smeared with jam. But it was too dense for this use. Maybe my dough was too dry. Maybe I didn’t proof it long enough. I don’t know. This sandwich deserved better. What a letdown.

I mean, I ate hell out of it anyway, but still. A bit anticlimactic, no? I can’t be too disappointed though. I have a big hunk of homemade bacon that will not go to waste. I have some killer homemade peach preserves that are begging to be slathered on this bread. I have a bunch of cheese in the fridge, which ought to be enough to make any man happy. And what the hell, I had a bacon egg & cheese sandwich for breakfast, and there’s not a damn thing wrong with that.

I wonder if there’s anyplace nearby that serves them for lunch?