Thanks to the power of twitter, I can look back on all the many and varied Full English breakfasts that I’ve (mostly) enjoyed:
👉🏻 https://twitter.com/search?q=rmoff%20%23fullenglish&src=typd
What makes a good Full English?
- Good ingredients, cooked well. Nothing worse than a limp pink sausage, as it were.
- Sausage, standard pork or Cumberland at most. Definitely no daft apricot and guava bean with a hint of foie gras nonsense. Must be cooked right well, crispy skin, almost burnt.
- Bacon, starting to crisp (but not deep fried and crisp-like as the Americans do it - it should bend if you pick it up)
- Black Pudding, seriously. Grim idea when you think about it (blood sausage) but so very tasty, and binds the other components together
- Fried eggs with runny yolks
- Scrambled eggs are making an appearance more recently too, after 30 years of not really caring for them. The dodgy “scrambled egg” that you get in some hotels I think straight from a packet mix are crap though and best avoided.
- Hash browns. Controversial, and often a bit greasy - but I’d never pass one by
- Fried slice - sadly all too often missing. I’ll forego hash browns if there’s a fried slice
- Tomatoes, but only if there’s more tomato than stalk as often happens
- Mushrooms, thicky chopped so there’s something to it - and certainly not the wussy sliced things that you get sitting in a pool of black greasy water at some fryup buffets
- Baked beans
- Good white toast
- HP Sauce - although I’ve realised recently that a really good fryup doesn’t actually need any sauce. But if it’s subpar and/or cheap ingrediants – gotta have HP sauce (and definitely not that awful “brown sauce” that you get in sachets and tastes grim).
