Beans in tomato sauce, sausage, bacon, egg, tomatoes, mushrooms and white toast. Why put all this deliciousness on just simple white toast, if you can turn it into something far more delicious: a toasted sandwich. We did it. We loved it. We will never go back to plain English breakfast ever again.

Because when you got thing between bread in your head…

Recipe Inspiration

Now admittedly, a full English breakfast isn’t the fastest or easiest breakfast you’ll ever make, but we will all agree that it is worth every minute of baking, grilling, cooking, boiling, cutting, etc., right!?

Inspired by the drizzly weather outside and an undeniable love for breakfast, we had to see whether we could take the English breakfast to a higher level! We took the ingredients and turned them into a toasted sandwich. Everything made on one single grill, all ingredients put into one single sandwich!

Taking it to a Higher Level

There, I said it. I think this recipe improves the English breakfast. I hear you thinking… That can’t be possible! But we did it!

Think about it… When you eat your delicious English breakfast with that plate full of delicious ingredients, you take a little bit of beans, a piece of egg, small chunk of sausage… Oh, wait, you want some bacon, too. Let’s make room for the bacon! Oh there goes the egg… Well, let’s add some tomato then. Oh, there goes the beans!

You see? You can never get that bite with all flavors combined. This toasted sandwich totally solved the English Breakfast formula and brought it to a completely new dimension!

Why We Love It

We have a huge love for breakfast, for bacon, sausage and eggs, beans, tomatoes and mushrooms. And for butter! And breakfast… We love breakfast!!! For some reason, everything tastes better for breakfast. Especially when you have to put some work in before you can enjoy it.

Because the English Breakfast is quite labor-intense, you will have to persist the urge to snack every little piece of ingredient before everything is ready to be eaten. Or am I the only one with that problem? No, wait, Jack has it, too 😉

So… As I was saying, English breakfast takes quite some time to prepare. And then when you’re finally eating, you’re just struggling through your breakfast trying to find that perfect bite.

Here’s our advice: take it one step further and put all the ingredients in a toasted sandwich. It’s the best of all breakfasts. It’s trumpets and fireworks. It’s so good, you’re going to find every English breakfast a hot mess of ingredients next time you eat it.

What’s a Classic English Breakfast?

Let us introduce you to the wonderful world of the English breakfast. There’s some key ingredients that are indispensable to a Full English Breakfast:

bacon
sausage
black pudding
fried egg(s)
white beans (in tomato sauce)
tomatoes
mushrooms
white toasted bread
butter

Bacon

How many different types of bacon can there possibly be, you might wonder. Well, quite a lot. Typically, an English breakfast will have a type of slice that is thicker, not necessarily crispy, type of bacon. You can opt for the bacon of your preference for our toasted sandwich. Our recommendation is to opt for thin slices that are more adaptable to the toastie maker.

The Perfect Sausage

The perfect sausage is typically called a banger (too early for jokes, right?), and it can basically be any kind of sausage that you like. Typically, they’re pork meat, but veal or beef will also do.

Depending on where (in the UK and in the world!) you are, sausages will have different types of spices and herbs in ‘m, making for distinct flavors. Try to look for a sausage that is made out of meat that is not finely grinded. If that makes sense… The sausage here needs to have some structure, some bite to it. You can’t use a hot dog kinda sausage. It’s just not the same.

The Black Pudding

One of those things that you’ll either love or hate: black pudding. Black pudding is made out of pork fat, pork blood, and some type of oats. If it doesn’t sound appealing, you should really try it first (when in the UK or Ireland!). Or opt for the slightly more palatable “white” version, that doesn’t include the blood.

Because we are currently based in the Netherlands, we decided to leave the pudding out for this time. There is no way that we would have found a pudding here that would be toastie-lab worthy!

The Fried Eggs

Eggs “sunny side up” in your fry-up! One, two or three eggs are normally included in your full English breakfast. Unfortunately, there’s only so much space on a toasted sandwich, and we’ll have to stick to “only” one egg in our recipe.

Nevertheless, it is indispensable for both the recipe and the English Breakfast. In the recipe below we will tell you how to get the perfect egg on this toasted sandwich version!

The White Beans in Tomato Sauce

The only thing that I can say about this is to go with Heinz White Beans in Tomato Sauce because “that’s what the English do”. End of discussion.

I actually found a cool YouTube video about how the beans are made!

For our recipe we blended the beans into a paste (including the tomato sauce, oh yes!). Imagine that while eating this delicious toasted sandwich, the beans would still be falling off before they reach your mouth. No, no, we can’t let that happen. No worries, it doesn’t take away any of the delicious taste!

The Tomatoes

My favorite part of the breakfast! Pan grilled tomatoes! This simple touch to the English Breakfast makes it a winner, for me at least! I looooove them so much! It’s super simple. You cut the tomatoes in half and you grill them in a pan, or in an oven (or broiler). In our recipe, we’ll grill the tomatoes on the grill, giving them even more grilled flavor!

Here’s a secret… I (Eveline) hereby confess that I secretly like to put tomato ketchup on tomatoes… Whoops!

The Mushrooms

Mushrooms for breakfast! Yay! There is no such thing as too much mushrooms, ever. However, the English like to include just a couple of these pretty, little wonders on their plate. If you ask me, add all the mushrooms in the world to this recipe! In the classic English Breakfast, the mushrooms are also grilled or broiled.

The White Toast

I don’t want to say too much about the bread that’s included in an English Breakfast – it’s kind of a heated topic on the Internet. People often use white bread, toasted in a classic toaster. Another option is to take the white bread, cover or dip it in the leftover sausage/bacon grease and place it in the oven where it will be toasted in the grease. It all depends on where you’re from.

For our recipe we used normal white bread and covered it with butter. Of course, because “that’s what the Toastie Lab does”!

The Butter

It’s not just us, the English do it to. Butter on white toast. Just because “that’s what everyone should do!”

The Burning Question

Why go through all this effort if the English Breakfast in itself is already a feast?! Fair question, here’s our fair answer:

Because it will all fall off your fork before you can take the perfect bite! Maybe I’m out of practise, but the biggest, biggest, biggest downside of the English Breakfast is that there is no such thing as the perfect bite… You have the perfect combination of perfect ingredients, but you can never get all of them in your mouth in one bite, without half of the ingredients falling off your fork. It’s a real problem.

Also, once you have already decided to take on the effort for making the Full English Breakfast, it’s only a small step away from turning this recipe into a toasted-sandwich one.

The Vegetarian Version

With today’s vegetarian options available in most supermarkets, it shouldn’t be difficult to replace the bacon and sausage for their vegetarian equivalents.

However, you want to be careful with the sausage you pick, because the vegetarian versions will definitely be the “smooth” type of sausage. In that case, a better option might be to go for a nut-burger and cut it into smaller pieces: it will be more like the texture of a sausage. If you can’t find any good vegetarian bacon, it’s worth to give home-made eggplant bacon a shot! 🙂

Lust for the Eyes?

Not really, right? We’ll have to be straightforward with you. This toastie just doesn’t look pretty. We’ll admit it! There’s no way around it. For this recipe to work, you kinda have to squeeze all layers into one sandwich. There are no pretty colors, no smashing contrasts or textures… It’s just an English Breakfast slammed into a sandwich. A grilled sandwich.

YouTube

Don’t believe what you’ve read? Go to our YouTube Channel and see for yourself! You can also find tons of other toasted sandwich recipes, with new recipes published weekly!

Equipment

Behind every great toastie is a great toastie maker. The same goes for this recipe. If it weren’t for our beautiful equipment, we wouldn’t be here by now! We are proud to present you the stars of our kitchen, the Winning Team of the Toastie Lab:

Tefal: Inicio Grill (Awesome for Toasties and All Grilling Needs)
Tefal: Infiny Force Premium (Hand Mixer Set)
Spatula (Any Brand Is Fine)

Using a regular toastie-maker will not work for this recipe. You can try it, of course, just like we did, (messy, messy, oh so messy!) and we would love to hear from you what you think.

Pro Tip #1

This recipe contains a raw egg that will be cooked inside the sandwich, inside the sandwich grill. In order for the egg to cook, it is important that it is grilled long enough. This recipe might trigger your patience-levels, but believe us, it’s worth it! If you happen to take the toastie off the grill and while the knife you’re using is halfway through the bread, you discover that the egg is not cooked yet.

End of story? NO! Disaster averted! Pick up your sandwich and quickly (or slowly – choose the pace of your preference) put it back onto the grill, where you will leave it until the egg is truly done.

Pro Tip #2

Another raw egg cooking tip: given that this sandwich is rather big, you want to make sure that the egg is either close to the bottom or top of the sandwich. This way, you guarantee that the egg is done before your bread is too toasted (black or burned).

The easiest way to do this is to stick to the order of layers in our recipe. We have deliberately chosen to put the egg on the bean paste and sausage layer, so that the paste would stick to the bread and prevent the egg from running.

Pro Tip #3

When grilling the bacon, we like to keep the grill open. We have experimented with grilling bacon on the grill and when we closed it, the bacon would cook way too fast and almost burned. (In a not-so-delicious-crunchy-way).

Sharing is Caring

But not for this toastie! Unless you are an egg-whisperer and you can tell the yolk to stay in the middle of the sandwich, you’ll either have to risk losing your yolk, or eat the entire sandwich yourself. We have made our decision… What’s yours?