Turning a Bacon Egg and Cheese Breakfast Sandwich into a Sausage — Prime Time

Welcome to Prime Time! A new series from Eater featuring Ben Turley and Brent Young of The Meat Hook. For the first episode, Ben and Brent are home at their shop trying to do the impossible, make a sausage out of a bacon egg and cheese, the iconic breakfast sandwich.

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– Before we opened The Meat Hook together, we both worked at a butcher shop in Virginia and we tried to make a coffee and cigarette sausage, (laughing) not realizing that if you put tobacco leaves in a sausage, and cook it, you could kill people. We stopped ourselves before that was the case. It never saw the light of day, but we were like, "Oh s***." We’re here at our butcher shop, The Meat Hook. – And today, we’re going to turn this bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich into a sausage. Let’s go. We make over 80 varieties of sausage. We started making custom sausage varieties, A, because they sounded funny, and B, they sounded really delicious so we started making things for fun. You make a couple of Italian varieties, then we learned how to make a bratwurst, then we learned how to make a chorizo. Somehow we’ve made it almost 10 years and never thought to make a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich sausage. Discovering what that sausage is going to be is its own journey. That’s why we were going to take two roads, one classy, one trashy, and find out what is the better sausage. – Why this is such an iconic sandwich is because you can get this at every corner store in New York. – How would you describe that egg? It’s like a scramble fry. – Scramble fry, yeah, flattop. – American cheese. – Definitely American. – I always go hot sauce mayo on my– – You go mayo? – I go mayo. – That’s the glory of a – you can almost always get a Kaiser roll, you can usually get a potato roll, you can get it on a bagel. – We’re going to go classy first. So, 20 pounds of pork to your cheddar? – Mmhmm. One pound Raclette. Four pounds bacon that we’ll render down. Classy Cento breadcrumbs. – What do you want to do for the eggs? – Let’s start with an even dozen and let’s just whip ’em like we’re making scrambled eggs and we’ll put ’em in raw. – Trashy, all right. 20 pounds pork, three pounds of Kraft singles. – Now, let’s grind some house bacon and then we’ll render that into little bacon bits. – One quart of Martin’s breadcrumbs, eggs. – We were doing raw on the other one, let’s cook these ones, so– – [Brent] Fry ’em? – [Ben] Yeah, we’ll fry ’em. – All right. – We’re going to put fried eggs in a sausage. – We’re going to put fried eggs in a sausage. – Well, if we’re going to do fried eggs, we should grind it through the meat, just so you can get it evenly distributed and that’s gonna look gross. – And you’ll actually get a chunk of egg in there. (laughing) eye of newt, chunk of egg. – So we’re going to make 20 pounds of the classy version and then we’re going to make 20 pounds of the trashy version, put ’em side by side and see which one is going to be hitting the butcher case. All of our pork is 100% pasture raised and comes from farms up in the Hudson Valley. So last night we got the pork cut into some small cubes. We started seasoning with the bacon cure so we can get that saltiness and that sweetness into the sausage from the get-go. – One sausage that we’ve continually tried to make work that never does, is Philly Cheese Steak. – Oh God. – The Reuben is also disgusting, putting the fermented cabbage and mayonnaise in a sausage doesn’t really work. – I’m realizing that the sausages we’re mentioning that are failures, are sandwiches and now we’re trying to make a sandwich. – This is also a sandwich. (laughing) – [Ben] In the arms race of classy versus trashy, which one do you think is going to come out ahead? – The cheese, I think is going to be the defining factor and I think Kraft Single is going to steal the show here because it’s melty, so it kinda oozes out. You can’t have too much flavor which I think is what this Raclette is immediately going to do. – Okay, since you’re choosing the trashy, I’m going to take classy. I don’t want classy to be all alone in a corny by itself, so. – We have our first pork mixture, do a fine grind. – Now would be a good time to tell you that this sausage isn’t going to be good for you. Let’s play God. That’s looking really good. (hammering) This is the point of no return. This is the classy one. – I will say, you can feel the bacon inside. You can definitely see the cheese. – The bind is pretty good. It means when we cook it and slice into it later, it’s not going to be crumbly. It’s not going to fall apart on us. – This is batch number two. Part of the best thing of a bacon, egg, and cheese, is all of the weird crispy bits. It’s got to be part of the sausage. Whoa, those are great. (laughing) – My grinder eggs, my dog, my grinder eggs. – You meant cooking in restaurants. (laughing) This is our trashy approach, starting with our bacon bits. – We’ve really lowfi’d how we cut this, so it’s just going to be huge chunks of American cheese. – [Brent] Some Texas P hot sauce. I feel like the orange of the American cheese is really shining on this one. – It really is. If the orange of the American cheese didn’t get em, the orange of the potato rolls ought to do it. We did two different grinds, so this is like a lot more smooth looking and this, you can see fat, you can see cheese, you can see meat, you can see bacon, so it’s a little bit more colorful. This one is just American cheese and potato colored throughout. I think we might have just spent a lot of time trying to make something that might not work out, but we’ll see. We’re just going to fry a few links of each one up. – [Brent] Oh. – Almost got your shoes, almost got your shoes. Oh, got your pants, got your pants. That American cheese is really, really oozy. Cool, we’re done. God dammit, we did this. – Whoa. – Right. We have our classy sausage here which I’m actually feeling pretty good about now that we actually saw it cooked up and then we have our trashy sausage here which looks like it almost came out like a f***** a radio activity, like I don’t even know what is so orange. Kraft, way to go. Let’s get the crew to try these. – Go for it. – Trashy, classy? – Classy, trashy. – That totally tastes like a bacon, egg, and cheese. – [Brent] Which one did you just try? – Trashy. – That one, on it’s own, man, is really good, but that one tastes more like a bacon, egg, and cheese. – Yeah, this is good. – It’s too much. I’m going to go with the classy. – [Ben] Yeah? – But do you think it tastes like a bacon, egg, and cheese? – Mmhmm, I do. – Classy first. – Mm, mmhmm. That’s an uptown girl right there. – [Ben] That’s trashy. It’s a f****** bodega, egg, and cheese. (laughing) I have to say, I was really skeptical. – Yeah? – Yesterday when you were dehydrating those Martin’s rolls. – Yeah? – But you guys came through. I’m proud of you. – Cheers. Wow. – Oh, that’s so rich. – That’s delicious. – Pretty good. I’m not sure it’s exactly like a bacon, egg, and cheese, – [Brent] Right. – But you get the egg, you get the lardon. Would you say the lardon’s are cooked pretty perfectly, Brent? – I don’t know. – I would say they were cooked pretty perfectly. – Not as well as those eggs you fried. You definitely get the cheese. – Yeah. Raclette was a bold move. – [Brent] Wow. – I actually really like the egg just put in raw. It’s adding, I think, more to the texture that way as well. It’s like a really, really good binder because there’s so much protein there, plus you’re actually getting the flavor just really, really evenly throughout. – [Brent] This is the trashy one, which actually just looks like bacon bits on the inside, but also actually bound. – You can see that’s like, really nicely studded. Worth noting, that we know for next time, the Kraft cheese has a really low rendering point, which just means it’s going to melt and it’s going to purge its fat at a very, very low temperature, so we might want to go with a stronger cheese next time, but let’s try it. – That’s looks like one of the eggs that I cooked. It’s really nice right there. – That tastes like a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich. – (laughing) It tastes like a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich. The hot sauce really helps. – I think the trashy one actually tastes like a bacon, egg, and cheese and we inadvertently with the classy one, I think with the cheese selection, I think it was almost more like a croque monsieur than it is a bacon, egg, and cheese. – I kind of want to punch you right now, but you’re also kind of right. – Yeah, that’s the fine line we ride like every single day here. – Surprisingly, I think we actually hit the mark and make a sandwich into a sausage. – (laughing) Load off my back. I can finally sleep at night. – Really full picture, you kind of taste everything. – [Ben] Yeah. It’s really good. – Let’s talk a little bit about the cut. – Deckle, also known as the second cut or the point it’s the fattier part of–