How To Make The Perfect Bacon Sandwich. Hmm...

First, don't tell my mother about this post. Second, the key to making a great bacon sarmie, according to uber chef Fergus Henderson, who should know a thing or two on the subject, is simplicity. If the essentials – buttery toast, bacon, lashings of tomato ketchup – are of sufficiently high quality, why complicate matters with extra ingredients? "HP sauce is fine," he says, "but mustard adds the wrong kind of sharpness, and oddities like marmalade are a step too far. Same with fillings: tomato and lettuce are all good, but not at breakfast. Avocado is a bit racy. Bacon and fried egg in a sandwich? That's too much."

The bread
We use a simple white sandwich loaf from the St John bakery, sliced not too thick. The bread needs to be toasted, to give the sandwich some rigour. A normal toaster will suffice, but we use an open grill which gives the bread a nice singe – singe is definitely a good thing. In a perfect world, you might even pan-fry the bread in some pork dripping.

The bacon
The bacon we serve comes from a farm in Gloucester and we've started curing it ourselves at the hotel. Bacon from the shoulder is my favourite, unsmoked and lightly cured. It goes on the grill alongside the bread – four slices per sandwich – or under your oven grill at home. The degree of crispiness of the bacon is up to you.

The butter
Butter is important – it lubricates the sandwich and makes it easier to eat – so butter both slices of bread liberally and lay out the bacon between them.

Serve the sandwich with ketchup on the side. We make our own. It's just tomato, onions, vinegar, apples and various spices – no mysterious monkish element prepared late at night. [The recipe can be found in the first St John cookbook, Nose to Tail Eating]. As for an accompanying drink, you know what's good? A glass of chilled Breton cider goes very well indeed with a bacon sandwich. Not sure about the cider, but the homemade ketchup sounds amazing!

Via The Guardian.co.uk