timing a breakfast
I used to say to anyone who started a Food Thread (on b3ta or IRL with, y'know, talking) that I didn't consider myself so much a cook/chef/BBQ wizard, as a ReHeater. Drooling conversations between sensation-starved diet slaves about the exact topographical in/out coordinates to slash a roast potato (with implied hand gestures) so that the gravy formed plentiful photogenic rivulets of brown shiny lustful slavering patterns on the plate have long annoyed me. Food porn is not my bag. Sustenance is essential but not to be idolised and fetishised. Terms such as 'Just punch it on the crown to crack it up somewhat' in relation to a solo roast potato that is being prepared for its gravy pop shot seems a little to involved for me.

It is a result of function and form and if I didn't have to eat, I wouldn't really miss it as a sensation. Still, if a new world order declared salt and pepper a criminal offence I'd kick up a fuss but I eat to live, not live to eat.

For survival's sake in my previous batchelor past, I have descended down to the laziest food prep that is between ordering a takeaway and munching a raw turnip, i.e. I was a fair hand at nuking a Birds Eye ready meal like a champ (and it would be leathery burnt crispy one end, ice-encrusted exploded vegetables the other. Still got eaten.

Things in a tin (nondescript) could be decanted and smacked about in the saucepan on a flagrantly-over heated hob, whacking away with a wooden spoon until the individual chunks were somewhat of a puree but at least the end result was that they were uniformly lukewarm and safe to ladel into your gaping maw while watching Robot Wars. Memory sparks a query- I just ate what? In a moment of subconscious vacillation about 'tastebud analysis is inconclusive, memory is temporarily unavailble, more information is needed' , you'd have to go back and dig into the kitchen bin to look at the label on the discarded can, to see what it was supposed to be and then mentally compare in disbelief at the abortion on your dinner plate compared to the succulent shiny delicious looking epicurean delight as shown on the 'artists impression' or 'serving suggestion'. Still got eaten.

Or, I would forget to stir during the reheat, no doubt something more demanding had my attention at the time (one does not simply discard a Level 9 Tetris game for mere food- yes, I could stop but I'd lose the adrenaline edge when I came to recommence.) so you got a charcoal-flavoured gravel at the bottom of the pan and a weakly bubbling tepid cloud of bits at the surface. So much for cooking for 1.

Since I've had the urge to try to cater for others' tastes and sensibilities these days (rather than just put up with my own crap for no-one else's amusement but my own)- read 'no longer a batchelor boy - I've tried to improve in the kitchen and by most standards have done.

Where to get my inspiration? TV chefs? Teletext recipes? those big tree-derived slabs of thinly sliced printed.....erm, y'know, Books.

I'd cast a jaded eye over pictures in colour supplements of Sunday Papers, showing glistening towers of meat and leafy green rice conglomerate, or smears of sauce on a pan which had 0.1 calorie value but carried a huge weight of artistic value in MasterBaterChef judging contests. Or even the marketing term 'rustic' which was code for 'they haven't done it properly so it'll be rough round the edges'. Pah.

Let's just get the basics right.

What I've done is not so much to invent new experimental items (although some of my improv gravy recipes owe more to the book of Revelations than Larousse Gastronomique) as to make a league table of what items take different times to cook, so as to make them arrive at (within a +/- 10% error) the same time.

The Saturday Morning Full English Breakfast can - depending on where you get it - consist of bacon (BACON! FUCKING BACON!)/fried eggs/sausage/beans/scrambled eggs/mushrooms/tomatoes/toast/black pudding/hogs pudding/fried bread/hash browns/ if you're aristocracy, kippers for some reason/if you're in a Premiere Inn, Coco pops and grapefruit juice and a Smug Guy croissant as an appetiser prior to the animal/vegetable/mineral banquet that is the reward for you doing the extremely hard job of Being Asleep for 8 hours immediately before. I say 8 hours, 7. Well, 6. Definitely 4. And if it's less than four, then you need this to stave of a potential heart/lung/kidney/spleen failure in the next lunar cycle.

Having a breakfast brought to you on trays is fine, someone else has to figure out getting it to you warm (or cold in the case of the Euston Rail Buffet in the 1990s, they never failed in their duty to make it uniformly cold first). As an aside, this is what we should be doing with tanning salons up and down the country, turning them into 'maintaining acceptable heat in meals stations by toasting them with UV rays'.)

But to quote Ronnie Corbett, I Digress.

You're making your own Full English. Let's take the middle ground and assume you aren't going too far outside the standard menu option provided by a Wetherspoons (p.s. the one in Derby town centre is a fab one for this and I don't even live there).

Say you have the ingredients and sufficient cooking rings on your camping stove/log fire/ Hindu faith fire-walking pit to be able to cook the different items in different cooking vessels. Prioritise by what takes longer to complete and start that on the road to deliciously cooked finishment in order.

A lot of people here (including sworn vegetarians who have iron willpower but still have pornographic dreams about it) will say- Breakfast is Bacon. Bacon is Breakfast. All else is supplementary. Without Bacon, there is no Breakfast. Amen. I count myself among the addicted.

So while coming back from the fridge with an armful of items to fry/toast/squeeze/flail/pulverise, a lot of attention goes to the bacon. Let us cook the bacon first, that way we know we shall always at least have bacon, the brain says. This is the Silurian hindquarter of the brain making its demands. There might be disagreement in the local troupe of primates, the alpha male might nick it, you may have to offer it to a potential mate to secure sexytime options, a tsunami might sweep it out of your frying pans and have it forever circle the mid Atlantic Gyre.

But stay your twitching grasping hand from instinctively slapping the slices of bacon on the fire first.

Bacon takes, what, 3 minutes to cook on a high heat frying pan? So what is going to happen to that bacon while you are fumbling about thinking 'OK Eggs next'? either it goes on to a plate and gets cold or it goes in a warming oven to complete the magical chemical process that slowly turns meat protein from juicy to leathery. This is the meat equivalent of hardening armour grade steel, where the bacon gains tensile strength by going through tempering, forging, annealing, quenching, resulting in a slice of belly pork that could smack the turret off a Soviet-era T72 tank if swung from the end of Iron Man's secret bungee cord launch platform.

Why put your bacon on 1st? Eggs take longer. Mushrooms take even longer. Hash browns take 10-12 minutes!.

So pace yourself. Bacon should be almost last to go on, unless you are planning on frying the OJ up to body temperature as well.

My Saturday Morning fry up is usually bacon eggs mushrooms tomatoes (maybe sausages) fried egg, (maybe hash brown). As much as I'm looking forward to the bacon and the rest is just decoration, it has to go cooking in almost reverse order.

time sequence-

Hash browns in oven 1st
2 mins later Sausages next on grill
Mushrooms chopped and put in oiled/buttered pan
2 mins later eggs in pan
2 mins later tomatoes in microwave
THEN and ONLY THEN do you put on the bacon as it cooks the quickest, except for the tomatoes but they can happily sit in their own juices and steam, they don't lose anything with waiting. Bacon needs turning.

3 minutes later, everything should hopefully be ready at once.

YAY!
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Fri 29 Jun 2012, 0:16, 8 replies)

TLDR, CUNT.

(yourmumonastickwithmintsauce, Fri 29 Jun 2012, 2:38, closed)

man, that totally told me.
what do you add to your reply to make it a cookbook response?
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Fri 29 Jun 2012, 2:57, closed)

How long does it take you to fry an egg?
Are you doing them in your slow cooker?

The reasoning behind doing bacon first is that it keeps it's heat longer than an egg. Fried eggs should not take longer than a couple of minutes. In this time, you can butter your toast.
(The Kwyjibo A big, dumb, balding North American ape., Fri 29 Jun 2012, 9:46, closed)

This.

I don't like a rubbery egg and if the pan is too hot you end up burning the bottom of it.

I have nothing against whipping the bacon out into a side pan to keep warm but eggs is egss!

Plus, then as a final addition to the bacony goodness left behind in the pan (and now it's a bit cooler) there is a great chance to slap in some fried bread. Be sure to butter on both sides to prevent stickage!

5t.
(fivetide, Fri 29 Jun 2012, 12:19, closed)

I have that ring on 4 instead of 6
I don't like to have runny whites in my eggs but I do like yolk to be so flipping the egg is not on. So as not to crisp up the underside it is necessary to cook it slower for longer.
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Fri 29 Jun 2012, 19:07, closed)

had to be done...

( DukeEuphoria Comes highly reccomended, Fri 29 Jun 2012, 14:32, closed)

Likey :-)
thank you.
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Fri 29 Jun 2012, 20:13, closed)

The last eight lines make perfect sense,
but I nearly died of starvation getting there. That and breakfast time was long over.
(yourmumonastickwithmintsauce, Fri 29 Jun 2012, 21:26, closed)