Over the last 10 years I have been researching the most important question of our time

What makes the perfect bacon and egg sandwich

And today I am going to share the results 1/many

I started off by deciding on the criteria of what is a bacon and egg sandwich and from this starting point I worked up to the end result

The main question was, what is a sandwich?
I decided that meant it was 2 slices of bread cut from a loaf with a filling between the 2

A moisture buffer between the bread and the filling was also included before I turned to the filling itself
The obvious choices were bacon and egg but this meant a lot of work would be needed to decide on the exact type of bacon and eggs to use and importantly how to cook them

For the bread I spent time trying different loaves and thicknesses of slices
I quickly discounted the idea of toasting the bread as that way leads to anarchy
Eventually I settled on thick sliced white bread as this would not mask the other flavours

The other benefit of a thick slice is it gives an excellent bread to filling ratio, but more on that later
For the moisture buffer I explored the various spreads available before deciding that one should go for a classic and I settled on salted butter

At this point it's important to stress that the butter should be at room temperature to allow for optimum spreadability
With 2 of the ingredients selected I moved onto the filling and started with the eggs

Various eggs were considered quail were too small, goose to big
Eventually I decided to follow my heart and use hens eggs, yes I know that duck eggs are superior but I was trying to balance flavours here and the humble hens egg was just right

Now I had to address the next question, how to cook the eggs?
Early experiments in poaching and scrambling where interesting but ultimately they were evolutionary dead ends
So once again I returned to the classics and went for eggs fried in vegetable oil (Sunflower)

Finally we came to the bacon question and after trying different cuts of bacon (Gammon too thick, streaky to thin) I went for back bacon approx 3mm thick
Different cooking methods were attempted but the grill proved to be the best one
Which left the big question

Should I go smoked or unsmoked for the bacon?
Unsmoked was the classic and up till now I was staying with a traditional sandwich
But I decided that smoked bacon was superior and gave an interesting flavour when combined with the rest of the ingredients

Just when I thought I'd finished I stumbled on an issue which was all about balance
I had thick bread, salted butter fried eggs and grilled bacon but the quality of these ingredient needed to balance each other

I had to consider the yolk factor as this would be a key issue in the bread to filling ratio
The yolk had to be runny but a single yolk wasn't enough to prevent the bread appearing too dry
3 were too many and threatened to break down the structural integrity of the sandwich

So I settled on 2 eggs from this worked out that 5 slices of bacon would complement this amount perfectly
The bacon was grilled on both sides untill the fat started to render down, not too much so it became crispy but not too little that the fat was white and soggy

The correct cooking of all the hot ingredients was key to a perfect samdwich and this is where experience counts
So to sum up after many long years I can say that the perfect bacon and sandwich consists of

2 slices of thick white bread spread with softened butter
2 hens eggs fried untill the white is set but the yolks are still soft
5 slices of thick smoked back bacon
The eggs should be placed on top of the bacon

Cut in quarters half way across each edge

Thread /end