Peanut Butter and Bacon French Toast Sandwich

Because every week is sandwich week, really.

This recipe works best with some nicely staled challah - we get ours from Costco. Don’t make any plans to do anything for at least a few hours afterwards.

Serves 2-3

Ingredients

• 3 eggs
• ground cinnamon
• 300ml of whole milk
• 50ml of double cream
• Skippy Smooth peanut butter
• 6-8 rashers of smoked streaky bacon
• 1tbsp of vanilla extract
• at least half a stick of unsalted butter to hand at room temperature
• icing sugar
• blueberries
• maple syrup
• 2/3 stale challah rolls (or other white bread)

Method

1. Preheat the oven and throw the bacon in on a baking tray.

2. Beat the eggs, milk and cream together lightly. Add in a good dash of cinnamon and the vanilla extract.

3. Pour the mixture in to a flat bottomed dish.

4. Halve your rolls and submerge them into the dish for a minute, flip and then do the other side too. Try to get as good a covering as you can so the mixture has really soaked in.

5. Melt a healthy knob of butter in your favourite pan.

6. Batch fry the toast, making sure the pan doesn’t get too hot and brown the butter too much. 2-3 minutes per side should do it but you can flip pretty regularly. Keep going until they’re a pleasing golden brown.

7. Once the toast is cooked, let them cool a little and then add a healthy dollop of peanut butter. Smooth works best with this recipe since it’ll melt quickly and is easier to spread without ruining the finish of your toast.

8. The bacon should nicely crisp by this stage - wipe off any excess grease with some kitchen towel, snap them in two and put them on top of one half.

9. Apply the top half, add a liberal dose of maple syrup, a cursory handful of blueberries on the side and sieve a layer of icing sugar on top.

10. Cancel your plans for the rest of the day.

• Simon.

[RECIPE] Bacon Pickle Animal Cheese Sauce

Last weekend, we defeated rain and spread happiness throughout Brick Lane with Hot Dog hero Big Apple Hot Dogs as part of his quasi-competitive food blogger meetup #BlogEATBlog.

We didn’t think it would be worthwhile doing anything too subtle or off-brand, so here’s our down and dirty entry. It’s a four element topping: cheese sauce with bacon, an In-n-Out style ‘Animal’ sauce, chopped pickle and bacon crumbs. Here’s the recipe for the cheese bit.

The end result looked like this on the day, so here’s the recipe so you too can make it at home. It goes great with nachos.

Ingredients

This makes about 1.5 litres. Which is way more than you probably want.

• Six tablespoons of flour
• At least a pint of full fat milk
• Frank’s Hot Sauce
• Chipotle Tabasco
• Kraft cheese
• About a dozen slices of American cheese
• A pack of streaky bacon (we like Oscar Mayer for this recipe)
• Two dill pickles

Method

Lob six tablespoons of flour and a cup of milk into a bowl and mix until smooth. Lumpy sauce is bogus.

Take your bacon, lay it on baking tray and bung that in a preheated oven at about 180-200 degrees. Lowish and slowish, since we’re after crispness here folks.

While the bacon is crisping, put the flour and milk mixture into a saucepan and bring it up to a gentle simmer. While it’s coming up to temperature, chop your Kraft block into nice manageable chunks.

When the flour and milk have combined into a nice runny sauce, drop the cheese in. It’s best to introduce it in batches. Remember, Kraft is not real cheese, so it will melt slowly. Don’t turn the heat up, keep it low and slow.

Once the Kraft has disintegrated, throw your American cheese slices in. They’ll melt much quicker and change the mixture colour in a most pleasing way.

Keep it hot and check for a nice gloopy consistency. It should look like this:

Now, grab your two best friends.

Generously apply Frank’s first. Mix well and check flavour. Frank’s adds salt, flavour and colour. So this is up to you.

Do exactly the same with your Tabasco.

Dice your pickles, then dice your bacon (which you should take out the oven about now).

Introduce half of your bacon into the cheese sauce.

Mix it all up and you’re done!

To make the dog, line the bun with animal sauce, insert your frank, dollop a healthy amount of cheese sauce on top and finish with the diced pickle and bacon.

[RECIPE] The Default Burger Anarchy Bun

Burger buns. So many different types. So many ways they can go very, very wrong.

Anyone remember that whole ‘Artisan-style Ciabatta’ debacle a while back? You catch my drift.

Most depressing of all is the bloody awful selection we get from the majority of our supermarkets and bakeries. Typically we have to suffer the following:

1. The humble white bap. A moisture-sucking floury roll that capitulates like an over-dunked Malted Milk in the face of burger juice
2. The crusty cob. A roof-of-mouth torturer.

And don’t even get me started on what they call burger buns, you may as well enclose your burger in two bits of fucking balsa wood.

Faced with this, I’ve tested various recipes over the last few months; from simple buns, to classic hamburger buns, to more fiddly potato rolls. More recently, with the increasing popularity of them at burger joints in London, I’ve had a go at differing brioche recipes too.

After finding some way too buttery or too sweet, I finally found this recipe.

And it’s a doozy, yielding light, beautifully textured buns, with that impressive shiny orange dome. Ever since, I’ve been using this for all of our burger experimentations, (including our Super Bowl Bacon Double Cheese, and the mini-concoctions for our rockumental burger fondue).

Give them a go, the prep is fiddly as fuck, but it delivers a very impressive cache of buns at the end, and they will give you results better than in most restaurants.

Brioche Burger Buns

Makes 10-12 4(ish) inch buns

• 3 tablespoons warm milk
• 2 teaspoons active dry yeast
• 2 1/2 tablespoons sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 3 cups strong bread flour
• 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 2 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
• Sesame seeds (optional)

1. In a glass measuring cup, combine one cup warm water, the milk, yeast and sugar. Let it stand until nice n’ foamy, about ten minutes.

2. Beat one egg.

3. In a large bowl, whisk flours with salt. Gradually add butter and rub into the flour between your fingers, making crumbs. Using a dough scraper, stir in yeast mixture and your beaten egg until a dough forms. Scrape the dough onto a clean, well-floured counter and knead, scooping dough up, slapping it on counter and turning it, until smooth and elastic. I do it for 12-14 minutes. The dough will be on the sticky side, so it can be hella messy and will stick to your hands, the kitchen cupboards, the cat, hell, everywhere. But keep in mind that the more flour you knead in, the tougher the buns will be.

4. Shape the dough into a ball and return it back to bowl. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place until doubled in bulk, between one to two hours.

5. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Using dough scraper, divide dough into 10-12 equal parts. Gently roll each into a ball, place on the baking sheet and then swish down a bit with the palm of your hand, ideally they should be two to three inches apart on the sheet. Cover loosely with a piece of plastic wrap lightly coated in nonstick spray/sunflower oil and let buns rise in a warm place for one to two hours.

6. Set a large shallow pan of water on oven floor. Preheat oven to 205 degrees celsius with the rack in the middle. Beat the remaining egg with one tablespoon of water and brush some on top of buns. If you want sesame seeds on them, lob them on top now. I don’t, typically. Bake, turning sheet halfway through baking, until tops are golden brown, about 15 minutes. Transfer to a rack to cool completely.

Boom.

• Rob.

(Recipe adapted from the awesome Smitten Kitchen)