Bacon, Egg & Cheese Biscuit Redux

When I was a kid - and, frankly, well into my 20s - I loved the Bacon, Egg & Cheese Biscuit from McDonald's. I don't eat at McDonald's anymore, and if you put said breakfast biscuit in front of me I'd be slightly grossed out. But I'd still be terribly tempted to eat it, partly out of nostalgia, and partly out of the fact that bacon, eggs, cheese, and biscuits are just a damned tasty combination.

Last week I made a beef stew that called for the beef to be browned in pork fat, so I bought some bacon. We're not at all in the habit of eating bacon, but I figured I'd fix bacon and eggs for breakfast today to try to use some of it up. But then I had an even better idea - bacon, egg, & cheese biscuits! Except with real food, instead of what McDonald's passes off as food! Wheee!

There's a recipe for cream biscuits in The Art of Simple Food, but it calls for heavy cream, which we didn't have, so I briefly considered my alternatives. One of these alternatives was a box of Bisquick in the cabinet. All that recipe wanted was Bisquick and milk, which we had. But then I looked at the ingredients in the Bisquick. Enriched bleached flour? Partially hydrogenated soybean and/or cottonseed oil?? Hell no! Off Neil went to the store to get me some heavy cream and a few other items.

The cream biscuit recipe called for all-purpose flour (Alice Waters likes unbleached and so do I), salt, baking powder, butter, and cream. "That was so easy," Neil said after the fact. "Why do people even use Bisquick?" Why, indeed.

The recipe was supposed to make eight small biscuits, but we ended up with four and a half big ones; they had to be big enough to make sandwiches with. I fried up a couple of pieces of Wellshire Farms peppered bacon and scrambled a couple of eggs. Neil invented a new fried potato recipe, which we have dubbed Scarborough Fair Potatoes; they're seasoned with parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. This herbal cliché is actually a really good combination!

We assembled our bacon and eggs on our biscuits and added slices of Cabot's extra sharp white cheddar. This version of the McDonald's classic was barely even recognizable as the same meal. The biscuits were dense and buttery (as can be expected when you use six tablespoons of butter to make four and a half biscuits), the bacon was thick and crisp and peppery and just... bacony, and the cheese was tangy. (The eggs were, well, eggs.) The potatoes were perfectly seasoned. We've been drinking Jackson's Organic coffee all morning and putting heavy cream in it, reasoning that we don't have any other place to put heavy cream and it'll go bad before we can use it. Very decadent, indeed.

Just out of curiosity, I decided to compare our bacon, egg & cheese biscuit to McDonald's:

Our Bacon, Egg & Cheese Biscuit
552 calories, 38 grams of fat

McDonald's Bacon, Egg & Cheese Biscuit
480 calories, 31 grams of fat

Oops. However:

Our Bacon, Egg, & Cheese Biscuit
Biscuit - Unbleached all-purpose flour, heavy cream (heavy cream, skim milk, contains less than 1% of each of the following: mono- and diglycerides, polysorbate 80 and carrageenan), salt, baking powder (corn starch, bicarbonate of soda, sodium aluminum suflate, acid phosphate of calcium), butter (sweet cream, salt)

Egg - Just an egg, yo.

Bacon - Pork, sea salt, raw sugar, spices

Cheese - Pasteurized milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes

McDonald's Bacon, Egg & Cheese Biscuit
Biscuit - Enriched flour (bleached wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), buttermilk (cultured fat free milk, guar gum, tapioca starch, salt, sodium citrate, carrageenan, locust bean gum, mono- and diglycerides, modified tapioca starch, food starch- modified), palm oil, water, contains 2% or less of the following: salt, sugar, leavening (sodium bicarbonate, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate), partially hydrogenated soybean oil, soybean oil, soy lecithin, natural flavor (plant source). Prepared with Liquid Margarine: Liquid soybean oil, water, partially hydrogenated cottonseed and soybean oils, salt, hydrogenated cottonseed oil, soy lecithin, mono- and diglycerides, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate (preservative), artificial flavor, citric acid, vitamin A palmitate, beta carotene (color).

Egg - Pasteurized whole eggs, food starch-modified, soybean oil, natural flavors (botanical source), sodium acid pyrophosphate, carrageenan gum, flavor enhancer [salt, maltodextrin, natural flavor (plant source), spices, herb, turmeric (color)], monosodium phosphate, citric acid, soy lecithin. Prepared with Liquid Margarine: Liquid soybean oil, water, partially hydrogenated cottonseed and soybean oils, salt, hydrogenated cottonseed oil, soy lecithin, mono- and diglycerides, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate (preservative), artificial flavor, citric acid, vitamin A palmitate, beta carotene (color).

Bacon - Pork bellies cured with [water, salt, sugar, natural smoke flavor (plant source), sodium phosphate, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite].

Cheese - American cheese (pasteurized milk, cheese culture, salt, enzymes), water, milkfat, sodium citrate, sodium phosphate, salt, sorbic acid (preservative), acetic acid, artificial color, soy lecithin and/or corn starch (added for slice separation).

Um, yeah. I'll stick with our version, thank you. I'll just use a less buttery biscuit recipe next time.