{"id":8070,"date":"2018-06-25T17:10:05","date_gmt":"2018-06-25T21:10:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8070"},"modified":"2018-07-03T05:10:27","modified_gmt":"2018-07-03T09:10:27","slug":"how-to-make-the-breakfast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8070","title":{"rendered":"How to make The Breakfast"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I wouldn&#8217;t have posted this if the comment thread on &#8220;The sad truth about toasters&#8221; hadn&#8217;t extended to an almost ridiculous length, but&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I dearly love classic American breakfast food.  I delight in the kind of cheap hot breakfast you get at humble roadside diners. I think it&#8217;s one of the glories of our folk cuisine and will cheerfully eat it any time of the day or night. <\/p>\n<p>I posted a fancy breakfast-for-two recipe a while back (<a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4224\">Eggs a la ESR<\/a>). What follows is the slightly plainer breakfast I make for myself almost every morning.  It&#8217;s the stable result of a decades-long optimization process &#8211; I haven&#8217;t found a way to improve it in years.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Ingredients:<\/p>\n<p>* Two large eggs. Ideally from chickens fed with bugs, not grain; makes a difference.<\/p>\n<p>* Four strips of lean, thick-cut bacon.<\/p>\n<p>* A slice or three of onion (variation in amount doesn&#8217;t matter much).<\/p>\n<p>* Half of a small lime.<\/p>\n<p>* Tuscan garlic boule.  Get it at your local Wegman&#8217;s; it&#8217;s a respectable supermarket imitation of Italian artisan sourdough bread.  The garlic adds savor.  If you can&#8217;t get this exact bread, make it some sort of sourdough.<\/p>\n<p>* About an ounce of dark chocolate.<\/p>\n<p>* Butter\/olive-oil spread blend.  Land-O-Lakes is a good one; there are others.<\/p>\n<p>Tools:<\/p>\n<p>* One heavy 12.5-inch diameter non-stick skillet.  (I&#8217;d use a real iron skillet, but cleaning and maintenance on those is a PITA so I reserve that for special occasions.)<\/p>\n<p>* One non-crappy toaster set to golden-brown level.<\/p>\n<p>* One 22-ounce pub mug.<\/p>\n<p>* Generic cutlery (bread knife, chef&#8217;s knife).<\/p>\n<p>* Wooden cutting board.<\/p>\n<p>Procedure:<\/p>\n<p>The reason I specify the step order I do is that this optimizes prep time.  The whole prep and cleanup takes less than 6 minutes. But linger over the breakfast itself, it&#8217;s worth it.<\/p>\n<p>Pull the buttery spread out of the fridge so it&#8217;ll have time to soften while you cook.<\/p>\n<p>Lay the bacon in the skillet; start cooking it on low heat. I use one of those mesh grease-shield things over the skillet to contain spatter.  It may also reflect enough heat to improve the bacon slightly.<\/p>\n<p>Cut a generous slice of boule, cut it in half, and drop the half-slices in the toaster. Don&#8217;t start the toaster yet.<\/p>\n<p>Haggle-cut the onions. Do this a little roughly so you get variation in texture; this gives a more interesting result than mathematically-precise dicing.  Do this after cutting the bread, not before, as you don&#8217;t want moisture from the onions on the uncut part of the boule you&#8217;re going to put away.<\/p>\n<p>While the bacon is cooking, fill the pub mug with cold filtered water and squeeze the half-lime into it.  Don&#8217;t drop the lime in, otherwise you&#8217;ll get bitter oils from the lime rind in your water. A bit of this would be OK, but if you let the lime sit in the water too long the effect can be quite unpleasant.<\/p>\n<p>Allow the bacon to cook until chewy and slightly crisp around the edges.  Set it on a paper-towel-covered plate to drain.  Either roll up the paper towel with the bacon inside it or put an inverted plate over it to slow down heat loss.<\/p>\n<p>Put the onions in the skillet.  Stir them around a bit so they pick up some bacon grease.  Turn up the heat slightly.  Push the onions aside to make room for the eggs.<\/p>\n<p>Crack the eggs into the skillet and break the yolks.  I like to keep them from running together to make later flipping easier.<\/p>\n<p>Note that a bit of delay between adding onions and eggs is no bad thing when you&#8217;re not in a hurry.  Giving the onions another 10 seconds on their own increases the odds that you&#8217;ll get some caramelization going.<\/p>\n<p>Allow the eggs to cook until their top sides start to bubble just a bit.  Flip them over; turn off the heat, the rest of the cooking is courtesy of the pan&#8217;s thermal inertia.<\/p>\n<p><em>Now<\/em> start the toast.  Your objective is for it to pop just after you get the rest of the food on the table.<\/p>\n<p>When the eggs look cooked, plate them and the onions and the bacon. If you timed things right, the onions have a bit of browning\/caramelization around the edges.<\/p>\n<p>Lightly salt the onions.  Add hot-sauce of the day to the eggs.  Most days this is plain old Tabasco, but I do vary it.<\/p>\n<p>Your toast should pop about now.  Butter and lightly salt it.<\/p>\n<p>Bon appetit!  Finish with the chocolate and the last of the limewater.<\/p>\n<p>Notes:<\/p>\n<p>By the time you&#8217;re done eating the skillet will have cooled enough to make it easy to rinse out.  I&#8217;m not fanatical about fully washing it; if the bacon-grease buildup is light and there isn&#8217;t obvious carbon, that&#8217;s just flavor for the next day.<\/p>\n<p>I used to do fresh mushrooms rather than onions and would still prefer that, but gave it up because they left heavy carbon deposits even on a non-stick pan.<\/p>\n<p>The dark chocolate isn&#8217;t just there because I like it; it&#8217;s a neuroprotective, a pleasant way to decrease my stroke risk.  I think this more than offsets the risk from the sugar.  A good winter alternative is to have a cup of hot chocolate with The Breakfast &#8211; I favor Godiva Dark.<\/p>\n<p>Cheaping out on the bacon probably hurts this composition more than anything else you could do to it while leaving it recognizable. Don&#8217;t do that.  Good meaty bacon anchors the whole thing.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, using bottled lime juice is <em>not<\/em> a sin against this recipe. Fresh-squeezed is better but not the really dramatic improvement it would be with respect to orange or grapefruit juice; it might be that most people wouldn&#8217;t taste a difference.<\/p>\n<p>The Breakfast is a sort of anchor ritual for my day. I frequently deal with a lot of challenge and novelty, by choice.  It&#8217;s good to have a fixed point in my routine, and this is it.<\/p>\n<p>If you are very lucky, consumption of The Breakfast will be regularly accompanied by leg stropping and purrs from a friendly orange Coon-cat who considers this an important part of <em>his<\/em> morning ritual.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I wouldn&#8217;t have posted this if the comment thread on &#8220;The sad truth about toasters&#8221; hadn&#8217;t extended to an almost ridiculous length, but&#8230; I dearly love classic American breakfast food. I delight in the kind of cheap hot breakfast you get at humble roadside diners. I think it&#8217;s one of the glories of our folk&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8070\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">How to make The Breakfast<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8070"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8078,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8070\/revisions\/8078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}