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.

Instagram
Twitter
Facebook page