Duck egg French toast with bacon, sausage and brown sauce



Brunch may well be the greatest meal in the world. Allowing you to mash together elements of both morning and afternoon dining, served up at a time when you’re not at risk of dozing off on your plate. If the mood takes you, there’s even the option of a glass of something a little more potent than your usual Twinings. What’s not to love?

Brunch sarnies are no exception to all this - it’s a time when the usual rules can be cast aside, and some truly magnificent brekkie-lunch combinations can come together. This offering is leaning a bit more towards the breakfast side of things, but don’t let that put you off.

To start with, the bread isn’t just buttered or toasted - it’s French toasted. With duck eggs. The bigger yolks in these puppies mean the result is a bit richer than regular French toast, but don’t worry if you have to use hen’s eggs - it’s all good. The bread (a nice white tin loaf) is left in the mixture for as long as possible, soaking up all the eggy goodness before being gently fried in a mix of butter and oil until golden.

For the filling, some Oscar Mayer bacon is grilled just short of super-crispy, and stacked on liberally. The rest of the internals come from some fried sausagemeat, salvaged from several bangers with seriously high pork content (you want 90%+ or it won’t work). The sausages are sliced open and their meat dumped into a hot pan, before being broken up, seasoned with a little crushed chilli and fried until golden. Given this is a resolutely savoury sandwich, there’s no maple syrup - just some decent brown sauce, dribbled liberally over the meat.

It’s big, eggy and hearty, and given how much of it has spent time in a frying pan, it’s certainly no heart-healthy option for a Sunday morning. It is, however, ridiculously tasty… and goes worryingly well with a little hair of the dog.