The Bacon Butty
So I’ve done 2 out of 3 of this month’s sandwiches from the List, and I might as well tackle the third too. The List’s first sandwich, and the final one of the three I’m trying this month, is a simple bacon sandwich. Hey man, I just had one of those the other day! Easy-peasy.
Bacon Sandwich. BAM! I’m done now, right?
Wrong. According to the Wikipedia page, we’re talking about a foreign job here. A bacon “butty” or “sarnie” or “sanger.” (Suddenly I feel less bad about American slang like “sammy”).
Buttered bread, OK. Served hot, check. Ketchup or mustard… now wait a minute. I like mustard just fine but I’ll be damned if I’m putting ketchup on bacon. Or on anything, really, other than a cheeseburger. I dug a little deeper.
Turns out the British bacon butty more properly uses something called brown sauce, of which the most common brand is HP sauce. And wait a second, that foreign bacon looks weird too. That is because what we call bacon here in America, they call “streaky bacon” everywhere else in the English-speaking world. Whereas what they call “bacon”–or more precisely “back bacon“–is more similar to what we call “Canadian Bacon.” Ugh.
I kid. Of course I already knew about back bacon and to be honest, this sandwich is the one of the three that I most wanted to do. It was going to involve buying fancy meats and foreign sauces and I just knew that I was going to love it. As it turned out I was DEAD WRONG about that but I’m trying not to be bitter.
The one place I knew of where I could pick up HP sauce and possibly some back bacon was Winston’s Market. Winston’s is located in Tinley Park, IL, attached to an Irish restaurant on 159th St. It’s where I go when I’m jonesing for some white pudding and can’t be bothered to make it myself. Winston’s carries a variety of Irish specialties, as well as English & other imported or house-made items that also appeal to the Irish palate. There are shelves and shelves of tea and weird snacks. I’d seen HP sauce in there on a previous occasion and had been curious about it.
HP sauce-the Brits go crazy for this stuff
Well I found the HP sauce easily enough, along with various flavors of beans that helped me put together my previous post. And in addition to the white pudding I love (and the black pudding I don’t) it turns out they do make their own brand of Irish bacon rashers. I picked up a package and headed home in triumph.
Irish rashers, or back bacon. Raw, obviously. Please cook before eating.
Again, I was ready to dust my hands off and call this post written, but that’s not how it happened. As it turns out, the first sandwich I made of Irish rashers and HP sauce on buttered bread was just truly godawful. The “bacon” was not smoked at all, and barely cured–once cooked, it was such a light pink color as to be practically white, without any noticeable “cured” nitrate flavor. Given the lean, flavorless pork loin and the fairly basic supermarket bread I was using, the sweetness of the HP sauce (which it turns out is similar to our A1 sauce but sweeter) had nothing to work with. It overran the sandwich. I was eating sugary steak sauce with nondescript meat and bread and it was not good. Even toasting the bread didn’t help.
Back bacon. Buttered toast. Note the complete lack of color in the pork.
I tried the sandwich a few times, tweaking prep and proportions, but I never got it to work. As I saw it, there were three things to fix about this sandwich: the ingredients. Bread. Sauce. Meat.
First off, I tried just adding some of my homemade “streaky” bacon to the sandwich. This helped quite a bit by giving the sweetness of the HP sauce a more serious counterpart than the pushover back bacon. I was still not fully digging the HP sauce though. Maybe the initial experiences had colored my appreciation of it, but I still felt like the condiments needed tweaking.
A variety of condiments.
I tried using A1 instead of HP. I tried using giardiniera. I tried roasted tomatoes. I tried various combinations of the above. I honestly thought the combination of roasted tomatoes and giardiniera would overcome any weakness of the other ingredients but I was wrong.
Finally, I was running out of bacon as well as patience. I bought a nice fat loaf of sourdough to have a sturdy base for my last shot at this sandwich. And I decided to bring HP’s big brothers into the fight.
HP sauce with some backup muscle
Having just done a head-to-head comparison between HP sauce and A1, I knew that they had similar flavors, with the A1 sauce being a little darker and more pungent; the HP sauce having a thicker, smoother consistency and that extra sweetness. Plain A1 would be a bit too much for a bacon sandwich probably, but using it to supplement the HP sauce would lend a sharpness that HP otherwise lacks. And Louisiana Hot Sauce can fix just about anything.
I was using my last 3 slices of back bacon on this sandwich and needed to get it right. I fried the bacon up nice and brown in my cast iron griddle, and another 3 slices of my homemade bacon. The sourdough bread was too big to fit in my toaster so I buttered it and broiled it.
Back bacon. Streaky bacon. Buttered sourdough toast
I put a layer of HP sauce on the bread, and added small amounts of the A1 and hot sauce, smearing the resultant mix to cover the entire sandwich.
The sandwich is ready for its closeup
There were no trumpets or sudden revelations when I first bit into this sandwich. At first, the flavors jostled for attention–salty bacon, sweet HP sauce, the bite of A1 and the heat of the hot sauce. Even the rich slick of melted butter got into the act. But as I worked my way through the sandwich, the ingredients did seem to come to a detente, where the amalgam of sauces finally balanced against the salty bacon (and the not-so-salty bacon underneath it).
I’d eat another. But I’d find a better source of back bacon first. And maybe I’ll just TRY EATING THE DAMN THING WITH MUSTARD WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME
I like sandwiches.
I like a lot of other things too but sandwiches are pretty great
I reckon you need to cure your own back bacon so you can get it right! (duh)
You probably know this already re: bacon, but the American version is common all over the world, except in a few holdouts of the British Empire such as Australia (where I live now.) France, Switzerland, Holland, most breakfasts at hotels in Italy where they have buffets — it’s the “streaky” kind. (A term I never heard before immigrating Down Under.) There’s often a pancetta presence on sandwiches in Italy, particularly in places that are more oriented to local customers. Hotels for tourists, though, they go American-style. Even during the four years I lived in Vancouver, I almost never found “Canadian bacon.” Which was OK by me. Back bacon is less fun to eat — no crunch. Unfortunately, that’s the standard in Oz, especially on “Aussie pizza” — shredded back bacon and scrambled egg for a topping. It’s also what’s found on burgers with “the lot” i.e. everything, including a slice of “beetroot” (as they call sweetened pickled beets.) I would imagine you are aware of that too, but I haven’t read every entry on the blog, so I don’t know your take on Australian sangers. (A slang word that’s not as daft as “bikkie.”) You have a fun blog here, mate.
P.S. You know why the butty tasted crappy? Because it’s Pommy. Brits are shit at food. As the joke goes, that’s why they had to colonise the world — to find some decent tucker.
The butty tasted crappy because he doesn’t know how to cook bacon. I don’t know how you can fry rashers and turn them into the grey rubbery pork chop-looking thing towards the top, or the burnt roast beef-looking bits at the bottom.
I like the suggestion of using sourdough, In Australia, bacon (unless otherwise qualified) means the same as in Britain. Never-the-less, I personally prefer streaky bacon for a bacon sanger.