Breakfast Sandwich #158 - Lab Report: Happy Hour Sandwich aka Don't Try This At Home

Sandwich: Lab Sandwich - Summer Sausage and Port Wine Cheese Spread
Date: March 25, 2020

I warned you that there may be a rash of Lab Reports coming your way and here we are but this is still not a cooking blog. I am going to try to keep this mercifully short but we'll see how that goes.

These items were leftover from a little Happy Hour event at my Mom's - cheese spread, sausage and crackers were a staple during cocktail hour at her place. I thought perhaps that might make for an interesting breakfast sandwich, minus the crackers.

Summer Sausage on a breakfast sandwich is not without precedence - it's been used previously in the lab and also appears on the menu at Graze. We've also experimented with cheese spread before.

I didn't mean to leave the Merkts out for a photobomb but it looks good back there. Also, note Merkts melty cheese spread oozing out of the sandwich.

The Sandwich - Merkts Port Wine Cheese Spread, Johnsonville Summer Sausage, chicken eggs, wheat bread. This required a little planning ahead as I wanted the cheese spread on the bread before toasting it. If you're familiar with cheese spread you know it needs to be out of the refrigerator for a bit before it's ready to spread onto a cracker or other carb vessel. I planned ahead for this scenario. I also did well with the eggs and the yolks remained in their yolky state.

The Result - A somewhat unsatisfying mess. It wasn't a bad sandwich but was a bit too gloppy and the flavors just weren't right. Regular cheese spread may have tasted better than the port wine variety, but I was working with what I had. The cheese spread didn't hold up to toasting, it shifted into a bit of a jam-like consistency, but it was really the flavor that didn't sit well with me. Not bad, but certainly not worth repeating. On that level, this was a failure. Summer sausage can be used effectively on a breakfast sandwich but it wasn't the proper protein here.

We did learn that happy hour foods are perhaps best reserved for cocktail hour. I tried to turn the tables on that thought process and envisioned breakfast sandwich items at a cocktail party. Picture a waiter with a tray of hors d'oeuvres at a gala-type event, perhaps offering a thin water biscuit cracker topped with a tiny fried quail egg and a little crisp of pork belly and an even tinier dollop of spicy aioli. That sounds like a winner and somebody needs to make that. Not this reporter.

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Breakfast Sandwich #126 - What The Hell? aka Lab Failures

Sandwich: Chili Mac, Egg & Cheese
Date: 10/24/18

This experiment started as a chance to use my new NORPRO 666 non-stick egg cooking rings. A couple of quick notes about those cooking rings - why is their product number The Number of The Beast and if they are sold as "non-stick" why is the first instruction to coat them with non-stick cooking spray before use? I guess if you're cooking chicken eggs IN HELL they tend to stick on account of the extreme heat. How are you going to cook eggs on a medium to low temperature when you're in the lake that burns with fire and sulfer? These are problems that fall well outside the scope and mission of the lab. This is a modest operation we have here.

The non-stick egg rings were an attempt to ditch the Mason Jar lid method which I've documented and never been fully satisfied with mostly due to the hassle of washing egg out of the lid rim. While prepping for this I realized I had leftover chili mac and considered how I could add that to the sandwich. My immediate thought was that it would be an impractical mess but I went ahead with the idea because that's how it works around here. To realize the perfect sloppy sandwich you sometimes have to go too far and if that means going into the project with failure hovering in your peripheral vision, so be it.

Right off the bat I broke the yolk and put the ring in upside down. 

The cheese did melt a little more but not quite enough. 

The Sandwich - I already told you about the broken yolk and while I was messing with the English Muffin and chili mac (which was heating separately) I overcooked the egg a bit. The English Muffin wasn't quite toasted enough, the slice of American cheese didn't melt as much as I wanted and even though I assembled the sandwich and paused for a few photos the chili mac was still hot enough to burn the roof of my mouth. I didn't even attempt to cut the sandwich for the usual cross section photo and after two bites the sandwich was a predictable mess and I had a burnt hard palate, which was upsetting. 

The Result - The sandwich was OK but it had too much working against it and nobody thinks putting chili mac on an English Muffin is a good idea. It doesn't execute properly. I'll try to be more practical in the future or better yet, go to an actual restaurant. 

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