We get a lot of visits from our American, Canadian and Australian cousins who frequently ask us how to make a proper English breakfast and about the right ingredients, so we created this full English breakfast recipe just for you, we British probably already know how to make it.
Prep Time: 5 minutes
Cook time: 30 minutes
Yield: Breakfast For Two
Nutrition facts:
750 calories and 55 grams of fat per serving.
Ingredients:
- 4 Pork Sausages
- 6 Strips Of Back Bacon
- 4 Eggs
- 1 Tomato
- 2 Cups Of Mushrooms
- 1 Can Of Baked Beans
- 200g Of Black Pudding
- Tea or Coffee
- Fresh Orange Juice
- 6 Pieces Of Sliced Bread
- Selection Of Newspapers
Instructions:
- The first thing to do is grill your bacon, that will take the longest and grilling it under 200 degrees, turning it occasionally will make sure it cooks evenly on both sides. Cut notches in the fat so it doesn't curl up when it cooks, making it more difficult to crisp up the fat.
- Next you need to start frying your bread. Fried bread is one of the English breakfasts dirty little pleasures because its so greasy, but fried bread is brilliant with a fried egg on top and makes your breakfast deliciously crunchy. Fry two slices and put them on a plate to stay warm near the grill.
- Once your fried bread is done, now start frying your tomatoes and mushrooms. They only need to be lightly fried before being put on the hot plate with your fried bread to await breakfast assembly.
- Now start cooking your sausages and black pudding, you can fry them in the same pan and they need to be fried evenly and well to make sure they are both cooked inside and out.
- Before your sausages are done cooking, put the other two pieces of bread in the toaster or under the grill. When they are toasted, put them on the hotplate with the other waiting ingredients.
- When you put your toast in is a good time to start cooking your baked beans, they usually just need to be heated up and you can do that in 2 minutes in a microwave or in a small pan on the stove. We like to serve them in a little pot so that they do not sprea
- When your sausages and black pudding are ready, assemble all of the ingredients on their final plates for serving. Plates should be large enough to hold all the ingredients of a full English breakfast comfortably without everything feeling cramped.
- Serve the breakfast with lots of fresh tea and coffee, together with a glass of fresh orange juice, its also nice to serve a glass of water with breakfast too.
- Make sure there is a selection of jam, butter and marmalade for the toast on the table, as well as salt, pepper, tomato sauce and HP Brown sauce if you can get it.
- Enjoy your breakfast! After all of that preparation you have earned it and this is the point where the newspapers are consumed, they are best when nobody has read them before you.
What should be on the list of 'standard' ingredients in an English breakfast is hotly debated, some people argue that black pudding is a prerequisite, others argue that french fries of hash browns have no place on an English breakfast plate and we would agree with them.
In this recipe, we are going to stick to the cultural norm and standard ingredients; back bacon, pork sausage, black pudding, beans, eggs, tomato, fre and mushrooms. This English breakfast contains approximately 850-1250 calories, between 45g-60g of fat, of which roughly 15g-20g are saturated.
Its fine to substitute the back bacon for Canadian or American bacon if you cannot get hold of any, I could not get any black pudding for instance, even the sausages can be substituted with a local variety, in fact in the old days local varieties of meat ingredients was the norm. Do not be afraid to reach for a tin of Heinz baked beans rather than bake your own, a generation of us grew up on them.
Optional Traditional Ingredients
Photo credit: Toby Keane, Hawksmoor.
As I said earlier, I stuck to the 'standard' ingredients in my English breakfast here, but traditionally the English breakfast contained much more than these commonly found ingredients, although it is hard to find them being served and even harder to cook them, especially for small amounts of people.
If you wanted to be more decadent and treat yourself, you can add bone marrow, pork crackling, bubble & squeak, pork pie, a huge pork chop and and home made baked beans to make a really traditional and decadent English breakfast feast for a group of people.
If you are interested in history, heritage and recipes of the traditional English breakfast, check out our official English Breakfast Handbook, lovingly produced by the English Breakfast Society.
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