Photo: Acabashi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Is there a better smell in the world than bacon frying? And is there a simpler pleasure than that bacon, hot from the pan, in a soft buttered roll? We don't think so.
A bacon butty is just bacon and buttered bread. That is all it is, unless you count the sauce, which we will come to. It is the easiest thing in the whole British breakfast repertoire and quite possibly the most loved. We eat them at kitchen tables and cafe counters, on building sites and station platforms, on Saturday mornings and after long nights.
We like to think of it as the English breakfast boiled down to its most important ingredient and made portable. When you haven't got time for a plate, you have always got time for a butty.
This depends entirely on where you grew up. Butty is a northern word, short for bread and butter, and it is what most people in the north of England say. Sarnie, from sandwich, is used all over. In Ireland it is a rasher sandwich. In Scotland the bacon goes in a morning roll and it is simply a bacon roll.
Then there is the bread, which is where it gets really tribal. The very same soft roll is a bap, a barm, a cob, a batch, a teacake or a stottie depending on which town you are standing in, so your bacon butty might be a bacon bap, a bacon barm or a bacon cob. People will argue about this for hours. They are all the same thing, and they are all delicious.
For us it has to be back bacon, the cut from the loin with that lovely eye of lean meat and a rim of fat round the edge. It is the bacon of the English breakfast and it makes a proper, meaty sandwich. Streaky has its fans, and it does give you more crispness, but back bacon is the tradition.
Smoked or unsmoked is up to you. What matters much more is that the bacon is good. Dry cured bacon fries properly and crisps up at the edges. Cheap bacon that has been pumped full of water just sits in the pan stewing in a puddle of white liquid and never browns. Life is too short for that.
Three rashers is about right. Fry or grill them until the fat is golden and starting to crisp, and the lean is cooked through but still juicy.
Soft white bread, every time. Two thick slices off a fresh loaf, or a floury white roll. We are not being snobs in reverse here. Soft white bread wraps itself around the bacon and soaks up the fat and the sauce in a way that a crusty sourdough or a worthy wholemeal loaf just can't.
Butter it. Or do what a lot of cafe cooks do and press the cut sides into the bacon fat in the pan for a few seconds. Either is correct. Toasting is tolerated, but only just.
And so to the great question. Brown sauce or ketchup?
The country is split down the middle. Brown sauce is sharp and spicy and cuts through the fat. Ketchup is sweeter. When people have been surveyed, brown sauce has usually come out a nose in front, and it is what most traditionalists reach for. A third group will tell you that good bacon doesn't need sauce at all, and they have a point.
We are not going to take sides, because we would like to keep our friends. We will only say this: the sauce goes on the bacon, not on the bread.
In 2007, somebody decided this was a matter for scientists. A team at the University of Leeds, led by Dr Graham Clayton, spent more than a thousand hours testing 700 different versions of the bacon sandwich, with different bacon, different breads, different cooking methods, and fifty volunteers to eat them. Nice work if you can get it.
What they found was that texture mattered more than taste or smell. The perfect butty had crisp, fried bacon that wasn't too fatty, in soft bread. They even measured it. The bacon should break under a force of 0.4 newtons and make a crunch of 0.5 decibels when you bite it. And they came up with a formula, which takes in the type of bacon, the cooking method and time, the serving temperature and the effect of the sauce.
We love that this research exists. We would also point out that any cafe cook in the country could have told them the answer for nothing: crisp bacon, soft bread.
A fried egg turns a bacon butty into a bacon and egg butty, which is a wonderful thing and very good for a hangover, but it is a different sandwich. The sausage sandwich is a close relation and follows all the same rules: good British sausages, split down the middle, in soft buttered white bread.
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