A Better Bacon Sandwich

Hello, and thanks for opening this week’s Notes to Recipes. I’m genuinely grateful that so many of you have chosen to support my work.

Today, we’re taking a deep dive into the bacon sandwich, with four recipes designed to work together: the perfect white loaf, bacon made from scratch, a smoked butter and a ketchup built for preserving tomatoes at their best.

This was an especially fun one to develop and write. Paid subscribers can read the full piece, get all four recipes and the thinking behind them, so now might be a very good time to upgrade if you haven’t already.

Ben x

Our train back from Totnes was delayed by an hour or so. This would have been a bind had there not been a caff perched just above platform one. We sat on faux leather-lined chairs and ate bacon sandwiches made with worryingly juicy back bacon, margarine and cheap white bread. Diet Cokes were mainlined, followed by white chocolate Magnums to complete the ‘this might cure my hangover’ trifecta. What had begun as a delay became a kind of emergency recovery session.

I’m not particularly picky when it comes to bacon sandwiches. I generally deploy them in circumstances where I don’t much care how sustenance arrives: quick service station stops, flights, the morning after a big night and, for that matter, before one. They are also almost impossible to truly eff up. Stale bread? Use more ketchup. Overcooked bacon? I think you’ll find it’s crispy. Undercooked bacon? I like ham sandwiches.

That being said, once aboard our Paddington-bound train, I opened my Notes app and typed: “Bacon sandwich, make it better.” What followed was two weeks of fairly whimsical development, built on the idea that even the food we turn to without thinking can be made considerably better by thinking about it.

There is an East Asian supermarket in Paddington Station, where I picked up an onigiri stuffed with cooked salmon. It was two in the afternoon, and I realised that everything I had eaten that day had been some kind of solution. Not very sexy.

Opening a packaged onigiri can be a struggle. There are strings, tabs and stickers that must be peeled away in a particular order, and one false move can take you from sushi to a very loose arrangement of rice and fish in seconds. I fashioned my mistake into a cohesive ball and ate it like an apple while waiting for the tube. With my free hand, I added another note: “Japanese bread. Small bubbles. Not too soft. Maybe lard. Good for bacon.”