[As published in May/June BayBuzz magazine.]
It’s the farmyard ménage à trois: Sultry oozing egg yolk married with a salty, crisp rasher, pressed into the enticing embrace of a fresh bun.
The trio of temptation, textural and flavourful perfection, an unqualified triumph, made more so in our household by the knowledge we made it ourselves, from scratch. As we smugly munch our brunch, we garner extra pleasure by delighting in the realisation that as close as we can we are real gate to plate, field to table, farm to fork foodies.
This is how to make a bacon and egg sandwich in under six months. It’s The Good Life in reel form rather than a multi-season episodic epic: here’s a few snapshots from our instagram feed.
We make the bread
Our current, and most enduring, phase of bread-making centres around the forgiving focaccia. It matters not whether you’re in for 100% hydration or prefer a crispier 70%. Whether it’s a slow-rise, gently warmed over-nighter or a two-and-a-half-hour hot-and-steamy quickie, our pane Italiano brings a rustic Tuscan fieldhand element that always goes down well. If I were a dough I would love to be this flexible. Not needing to be kneaded is a wholesome aspiration. Focaccia is the utilitarian of the bread brigade. If, like me, you cannot be arsed making sourdough then this is the bread for you. I’m not sure I want to put my jaw muscles through the exercise of another sourdough roll anyway. As one gets older masticating becomes more of a chore. Our house special is a litre of water to a kilo of flour (80% high grade and 20% wholemeal), a good slosh of decent EVOO, salt and yeast.
We collect the eggs
Our flock began with a hen we named Teapot and her four small dependents, two of which are roosters and so no longer live with us in suburbia but instead in bucolic settings where their choral expressions are tolerated if not appreciated. Their sisters, Biscuit and Piano (I’m not on the naming working group), lay small- to medium-sized blue eggs most days. Linda and Jools are the serious egg-laying hybrids, whose presence facilitates cake baking. We buy layer pellets to feed them all ad-lib via a feeder that has a step the hens stand on, which – through a lever mechanism –opens the lid allowing them to eat willynilly, whenever peckish. They are confined to a run, but we do allow them evening tours of the garden.
We raise the pigs
Our baconers live an idyllic country life. They sport nasal piercings reminiscent of a competent barista, and grunt just as coherently. Roaming their large grassy enclosure from morning til dusk, feeding on apples, grass and food-prep scraps, these Berkshires are covered mostly with black hair and frequently with mud. They’re not a commercial breed so grow slowly and produce a vastly superior meat. I’ve kept pigs on and off for over thirty years and these beauties are the best we’ve ever raised. Over the decades I’ve killed my pigs on-farm and processed them into a variety of smallgoods, including the delicious biraldo blood sausage. Even the average pig’s intelligence and friendliness mean I no longer want to be involved in that part of the operation. The excellent folk at Wild Game Salamis do the work and we simply enjoy the result. Back-in-the-day Holly Bacon would handle the off-farm swine but no longer. We are fortunate in Hastings to boast two of the very best bacon makers and it’s worth seeking them out.
The word bacon shares etymology with the word back, which indicates where on the carcass bacon comes from. Side note: the Italian for stomach is pancia, which indicates where pancetta comes from.
For our home-grown sandwich we are using middle bacon, which if we ate the beast fresh would be a chop. Smoked, brined and air-dried bacon is a treasure. Clarify in your mind the importance of bacon by imagining a world without bacon. My apologies, it doesn’t bear thinking about.
We assemble the sarnie
In recent years the sandwich has experienced a super-sizing transformation but we keep things old-school. I like to cook bacon in the oven until just crisp. Eggs must be fresh, cracked into a pan with oil and melted butter at a low heat. Think poaching in oil or butter rather than vigorous frying; call it froaching. Butter the bread, lay down your bacon, squeeze a little ketchup and top with your egg. The yolk – indisputably nature’s finest sauce – must be runny so dress appropriately because you’re going to get squirted. Add a few drops of hot sauce, butter the lid and devour it! Do not nibble. This is no time to be half-hearted. Just because it took six months to make doesn’t mean it can’t take 60 seconds to eat.
We sit in the sun with self-satisfied smiles. The sandwich is now nothing but a smear of yolk on the plate and a wonderful memory, ideally accompanied by coffee and a comfortable seat under an umbrella in the Hawke’s Bay sun.
No we didn’t grow the wheat, or grind the flour, or raise the cows for the cream to make the butter. Yes, Wattie’s made the ketchup. But we’re still delighted by our own B&E sammie and our ongoing fascination with gigolo bread and aging hens. We’re not real farmers, we don’t have to weather the storms of meteorology, money and trade, but we are closer to nature than before.
Ian Thomas is a caterer and formerly free range egg farmer, cooking demonstrator, and manager of a commercial food production business. He specialises in cooking paella. paellaagogo.com
