Tag: English Muffin

Oven Baked Bacon

I've cooked my bacon this way for several years. It's easy and simple. I like simple breakfasts.

I like thick cut bacon but my family (except for my vegetarian wife) prefers the thinner slices. The bacon expert in the house, my daughter Kiran, says the thin slices cook more crisp. I'm still practicing and developing my technique for cooking super crispy bacon while preventing burning. But I think she's correct; the thicker cuts will produce chewier bacon while the thinner cuts will produce crisper bacon. When I choose bacon, I look for a nice blend of meat and fat, with a little more meat than fat.

Every year we take part in my wife's family's version of the white elephant game. My wife doesn't believing in wasting money so we always try to buy something that still has practical use. Better yet, something we would use ourselves. My wife and I are good bargain shoppers on Amazon.com and find it easy to find something within the defined dollar limit. One year we found two items we liked, an electric breakfast sandwich maker and an electric waffle maker. Both met the dollar limit. We bought both. We kept the waffle maker and won back the sandwich maker.

One Thomas' English Muffin fits perfectly within the sandwich maker. I learned how to make egg, cheese and sausage sandwiches in three minutes with minimal clean up. Just separate the English muffin layers and layer on the fixings: egg, cheese, sausage. At first, I put the whole egg directy into the top layer. But in the last few months I've experimented with whisking a a tablespoon of heavy cream into the egg. It produces a light fluffy (and less chewy) egg layer for the sandwich.

Oven Baked Bacon

  • Servings: 1
  • Difficulty: easy
  • Print

A hands-free, easy method for cooking perfect bacon in the oven.


  • Nutrition facts: 390 calories, 29g carbohydrates, 19g protein, 19g
  • Credit: Khürt Williams

Ingredients

  • 2 slices Trader Joe's Uncured Apple Smoked Bacon
  • 1 Thomas' Cinnamon Raison English Muffin
  • 1 Wegmans Organic Large Brown Egg
  • 1 tablespoon heavy cream

Directions

  1. Pre-heat oven to 400ºF (~ 204ºC).
  2. While the oven is heating up, arrange bacon slices side by side on an oven baking rack and place in baking pan.
  3. Put pan in oven when oven temperature reaches 400ºF. Cook in oven for 20 minutes.
  4. Pre-heat electric sandwich maker.
  5. While the sandwich maker is heating up, whisk the egg and heavy cream for 15 seconds.
  6. Pour egg into top half of sandwich maker. Cook for 3 minutes, 30 seconds.
  7. Separate halves of English muffin and toast.
  8. Remove cooked egg from sandwich maker and place atop English muffin.
  9. Remove cooked bacon from oven and set to cool.
  10. Make coffee.

Healthy

Breakfast is commonly referred to as the the most crucial meal of the day. There is no scientific basis for that statement, but some research indicates that having breakfast may lower the risk of metabolic disorders and cardiovascular diseases. Some kind of breakfast is better than no breakfast.

Growing up in the British West Indies, visiting my grandmother in the Grenadines meant a breakfast of fresh oven-baked bread or fried “cou-cou”, a fried “sprat”, and a large enamel mug of “cocoa tea” (hot cocoa1). That was my favourite break, especially the fried cou-cou2. Delicious.

On the island of St. Vincent, where I was born, we would sometimes have bread with salted butter and English black pudding. Sometimes we ate roast breadfruit, fried and slathered with salted butter, fried sprat, and a few slices of fried sweet plantain.

These were hearty meals meant to get one going for a day of work.

I’ve now lived in the United States for over thirty years, most of that time in New Jersey. Black pudding is challenging to find in New Jersey. So are sweet plantains, sprat, cou-cou and breadfruit. I’ve had to adapt to my breakfast.

My current favourite homemade breakfast is thick-cut bacon cooked in the oven at 204ºC (~400ºF) for twenty minutes, with eggs cooked in the bacon fat, and a double protein Thomas’ English muffin.

That’s 27g of carbohydrates, 20g of protein, and 24g of fat. Healthy.

Created by photographer Frank Jansen, the Tuesday Photo Challenge is a weekly theme-based challenge for photographers of all kinds to share both new and old photography.

  1. Cocoa nibs ground up and mixed with spices like cinnamon and nutmeg, then rolled into tube-like cocoa sticks. The stick is ground up or boiled into hot milk and served in a mug. ↩
  2. Cou-cou, coo-coo (as it is known in the Windward Islands), or fungi (as it is known in the Leeward Islands and Dominica) makes up part of the national dishes of Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, British Virgin Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It consists mainly of cornmeal (corn flour) and okra (ochroes). ↩