The Breakfast Roll

It’s a weird month at the Tribunal (but then again, when isn’t it?), and the alphabetical order in which we’re exploring the List has dealt us a couple of very similar sounding items. The standard (read: American) Breakfast sandwich (my post on which will be published on the 31st), and the Breakfast Roll, which is the UK/Ireland version of a breakfast sandwich. Now I’m quite familiar with breakfast sandwiches, but as I demonstrated while researching our other topic this month, the British Rail sandwich, I just don’t get English sandwiches at all. Irish sandwiches, well, we’ll get to that.

Since I was already asking my British friends about sandwiches for the British Rail post, I took the opportunity to ask them how they liked their breakfast rolls as well.

Steve said, “Bacon and egg sani is unbeatable. With lashings of brown sauce.” I’ve had issues with HP sauce and back bacon before, so I asked what kind of brown sauce, crossing my fingers and hoping he wouldn’t say HP. “Of course HP. Although I prefer ‘HP Fruity.’ That’s like asking for ketchup and saying no Heinz!”

So I tried a bacon and egg sandwich with HP Fruity.

Steve actually said to use regular wheat bread but a perverse streak of literalism within me insisted that a “Breakfast roll” needed to be in an actual roll. He also suggested regular American bacon. I remembered a discussion though in which my friend Marinus said that outside the US, most people use back bacon more regularly than streaky bacon. Something about pork belly being too fatty for daily use. Whatever. I used both. Steve had said that the yolk and the HP sauce would be magic together–I detected no alchemy but the sandwich was much improved by the addition of some Nando’s Peri Peri hot sauce that I’d picked up at Winston’s while getting the other English & Irish ingredients.

Ian‘s suggestion was “Sausage, bacon and egg (fried, yolky) and brown sauce on a soft white roll, or barm as they call them around these parts.” I asked if there were a brown sauce that I might like better than HP and he said, “HP is standard, man. Although a lot of people swear by Daddies.”

So I got some Daddies brand brown sauce and made a sandwich. Ian said that Lincolnshire sausage was his favorite–I read a bit about it and found that the description sounded similar to the sage flavored breakfast sausage that’s common in the US. I used a breakfast sausage patty along with 2 rashers of Irish bacon and an egg fried over-easy. I put brown sauce between the bacon and sausage, and again on top of the egg, then cut the sandwich in half, allowing the runny yolk to permeate everything.

Lest the legions of HP fans descend on Ian, please note that he did not actually recommend Daddies brand brown sauce, he only suggested it as an alternative to HP sauce, which I’d been less than thrilled with in the past. And when I first shook the Daddies sauce onto this sandwich, I was a bit taken aback by its texture, which had a semi-gelatinous, congealed look, like the transparent goop in a can of spam. But whether it was because I integrated the sauce into the sandwich better (Ian’s suggestion: put the sauce on the meat & egg instead of on the bun. It definitely works better that way.) or because the Daddies sauce itself seemed to have a bigger presence of vinegar, more like our A1 sauce, I actually liked it in this sandwich. 

I hadn’t been able to interview my friend and former coworker Mark in time for the British Rail post, but I did manage to get a breakfast roll recommendation from him. “I liked just straight up bangers and eggs in a soft buttered white roll back home. Nothing fancy. Two fat link pork sausages (Spencer’s is the closest to an English sausage I have had in the US) and an egg over easy. Butter on the bread.” He said the Irish bangers I had on hand would make a fair substitute though. I steamed & pan fried a couple of bangers, sliced them lengthwise, doused them in HP sauce, and put a fried egg on top. This mess went between the two griddled halves of a kaiser roll and made an excellent breakfast. Somehow the soft fattiness of this sausage made an even better partner for the sauce/yolk combo than the hard edges of the bacon or the sausage patty used previously.

I guess I must be starting to come around on brown sauce. (What the hell is wrong with me?) I had done a taste test the previous night between the three I had on hand–HP, HP Fruity, and Daddies. (I’ve had people suggest Chef brand also, but that will have to wait for a future test.) It seems that for most people, there is no substitute for HP, but I wanted to give each a shot so I tried all three with a fairly neutral flavored pork roast. Though I liked them all, the regular HP was the clear winner. 

Breakfast as a murder weapon: the Irish Breakfast Roll

So far, the British versions of a breakfast roll have been pretty good. But though the List of Sandwiches on wikipedia references both the UK and Ireland in the Breakfast roll entry…

…the Breakfast roll article itself focuses on the Irish version. It seems that during the late 1990s and up through most of the 2000s there was an economic boom in Ireland, and the resultant construction boom made for a lot of hard-working contractors needing an on-the-go breakfast. Hence the Jumbo Breakfast roll, an Irish fry-up in a bun, as immortalized by Pat Shortt in his song Jumbo Breakfast Roll.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIIWKA_h12Q

Though the boom has since gone bust, the sandwich remains a part of Ireland’s cultural consciousness. You can even get one at McDonald’s over there.

I eased my way into the Irish version of this sandwich by starting with a relatively simple combination of white & black pudding with a fried egg.

I fried up several slices of each pudding crisp in a pan, and ate them in a buttered roll with an egg fried over-easy, skipping the brown sauce for this one. I tend to prefer white pudding to black generally. It’s not the blood in the black pudding that bothers me; there’s often a pervasive clove flavor that I find offputting. When the black pudding was combined with the white pudding in a sandwich, the clove was still there in varying levels from bite to bite, but less intense, making for a pretty satisfying breakfast.

Looking for additional combinations to try, I found this WordPress post describing an Irish breakfast roll and decided to make one of these as well.

For this sandwich, I had all 4 burners on the stove going as well as the microwave (for the beans), which is quite a production for a weekday breakfast. I spread the bun out, buttered it and browned it in the griddle. I mashed the beans a bit with a fork and spread them across the bottom side of the bun, then dashed a bit of the Nando’s hot sauce on them. The rashers went on next, then hash browns, black pudding (once I remembered to add it), bangers and mushrooms, with liberal doses of HP Fruity on the bacon and sausage. Unfortunately, the bun’s top and bottom halves separated so this sandwich was not an engineering marvel. Around the third bite, it began to disintegrate. The mushrooms went first (at which point Mindy began stealing them from my plate), then the black pudding and bangers. Soon enough, all that was left between the bread were beans and bacon. I think that if the bun were still whole and presented a solid bottom through which ingredients could not fall, the sandwich would work better. I needed to reconsider griddling the bread, as spreading the bun out flat tends to make it more brittle.

Or perhaps there is a trick to the Irish Jumbo Breakfast Roll I wasn’t getting. I turned to Twitter asking for tips, but I received few responses. I’d been hoping to build up to it more gradually but at this point I had no alternative but to try the Pat Shortt version. Honestly, though, who wouldn’t want to take diet advice from this guy?

The chorus of the song describes the sandwich like this:

Two eggs, two rasher, two sausage, two bacon, two puddins, one black and white
All placed like a tower on top of each other and then wrapped up good and tight
If you’re having some tea the milks over there and you’ll find sugar in the bowl
Says she “Do you want some sauce on that?” says I, “I do in my roll”

The verses also mention melted butter dripping from the roll and the eggs being runny. Since the song uses the words rasher and bacon separately, I used 2 rashers of Irish bacon and 2 slices of streaky American bacon. For the sausage, I used sausage patties, which I felt would stack better than bangers would. I got out the big griddle and had the sausage, puddings, and rashers going there, with the bacon in a different pan and the eggs in yet another. I heated the roll in the oven a bit, then buttered the inside copiously, being careful to leave the bun intact so the ingredients wouldn’t fall out the bottom. I couldn’t see how placing everything like a tower on top of each other was going to be a sound piece of sandwich engineering, but then I’m not an Irish construction worker, so I just put it together the best way I could.

The eggs were a bit shy of runny–it’s hard making sure everything gets done at the right time, and they ended up cooking just longer than they should have–but the yolks were still nice and soft. Once I had it put together, I knew that there was no way I could eat the whole thing, or that if I did, I’d never burn all those calories that day. Again, I’m not working construction, just riding a desk and dicking around on computers. I cut it in half (well, 60/40, they’re not big eaters) and shared it with my wife and our youngest.

The 7yo loved it. OK, I guess I did too.

I think this sandwich may end up killing me the way it’s killing Irish construction workers. But I could only conceive of one way to top that monstrosity; do up a Full Irish Breakfast, then stuff the whole thing in a bun.

Beans. Fried tomatoes. Irish bacon. White and black pudding. Bangers. Hash browns. Fried egg. Mushrooms. Several applications of HP sauce throughout the layers. I’m not sure I have the words to describe this sandwich, or my reaction to it. I was stupefied in its presence. Rationality broke down around this sandwich, the way the laws of physics break down in the presence of a black hole. In fact, I’m glad I didn’t add a fried slice, as I’d considered, or the thing might have collapsed under its own gravity. Yes, I very nearly caused a sandwich singularity. For a while, I could only stare in wonder. 

This time, I had taken things too far. This was not a sandwich; this was a stunt. I had to eat it with a knife and fork. Just the debris left over from assembling this sandwich was enough to make breakfast for the rest of the family, and in fact Mindy had to help me finish. Holy crap was it good though.

Ireland, you have not broken me. Though I may need to eat nothing but salads for a month after this; though I may be sweating pork fat for days; though I may be plagued by visions of knife-wielding meat homunculi creeping up my legs, while sleep paralysis renders me unable to move or call out for help; I will overcome. You may take my life, but you will never take my sandwiches. (Yes, I know that’s Scotland, not Ireland.). As your great playwright wrote, there is no love sincerer than the love of food.