Vegetarian Times featured this cool egg recipe in their January 2007 issue (which I can’t get online yet) and I immediately wanted to try it. Of course, I had to add bacon, thus rendering it inedible for actual vegetarians, but whatever.
Their version involved using tiny ramekins, and breaking an egg, unscrambled, into each ramekin, but Mr. X only has one big ramekin, so I had to improvise a bit. Plus, I didn’t have the recipe with me, so I had to reconstruct it from memory. In future, I think there are a few small changes I would make, but otherwise this was totally easy and awesome. I cooked it up with some sliced fingerling potatoes for a twist on a traditional Sunday morning breakfast.
Bacon and Egg Pies
- 3 large eggs
- 2 slices bacon
- 2 small roma tomatoes, diced
- 2 slices of whole wheat bread (not too dense or nutty, you have to be able to flatten it out)
- 1 tbs. butter
- Salt and Pepper
- About 1/2 lb. fingerling potatoes (or any potatoes you want to make homefries), sliced
Preheat the oven to 350F (or higher–maybe 375 or 400 would work better?). Heat a skillet over medium high heat, and cook the bacon until the fat is rendered out. You can cook it until it’s crispy if you want, which I might do in the future. Remove the bacon from the pan, and add the potatoes (you might need to add more oil here). Sprinkle the potatoes with salt and pepper (and some paprika or something), and let them sit, without too much stirring, so they brown a little.
Meanwhile, roll out two slices of bread with a rolling pin, until it’s about 1/8 of an inch thick, butter the bread, and line the ramekin with it, like a pie crust, butter side down. It probably won’t fit perfectly, but that’s ok. Cut up the bacon into small pieces, and put the tomatoes and bacon into the ramekin.
Whisk the eggs with a little bit of water or milk (about a tablespoon or two), and just pour it into the ramekin over the bacon and tomatoes. It’s sort of like making a quiche. It will puff up a little in the oven, so you might want to put some tin foil or a baking sheet on the floor of the oven, in case it spills over.
Then just put the egg pie/quiche thing in the oven, along with the potatoes in the skillet, and cook both for about 25-30 minutes. I needed to cook it a lot longer, which is why I suggest perhaps a higher temperature. They would likely cook faster in smaller, individual sized ramekins, too. Cook them until the eggs look as done as you like them–some people like them runny, some almost burned. That’s up to you. Then just let it cook for a few minutes so you can more easily remove it from the ramekin and serve.
Future cooking suggestions:
- It might be wise to bake the bread piecrust in the oven for a few minutes before adding the tomatoes, bacon, and egg. My crust got pretty soggy, and definitely wouldn’t have been able to be removed from the ramekin like they did in the magazine.
- I think it should have been cooked at a higher temperature. 350F might work for the individual sized pie things, but it took way longer than I expected and the eggs were still runnier than I would have liked.
- Broiling it (maybe with some cheese sprinkled on top?) right before taking it out of the oven would have been nice, too, but I couldn’t figure out how to work Mr. X’s broiler.
When I get home tonight, I’ll check out the original recipe again, and post any additional modifications. If I remember. Generally, I think it’s pretty much impossible to fuck up eggs and bacon. This wasn’t really as elegant as the VT recipe, but it was a great Sunday morning breakfast, and might become a new staple.