One of the perks of my job is that I get to travel to some pretty nice places (hi, San Francisco, Bergen, Åland Islands), and get to eat some pretty good food too. If you’re looking for some techie content, then move along and go and read about Kafka, but if you enjoy food pr0n then stay put.

I was working for a client in the centre of Manchester this week, staying as usual at a Premier Inn. I’m a big fan of my fried breakfasts, and whilst never anything to write home about (or indeed write a blog about) Premier Inn breakfasts are generally fine for what they are – but this one was a real disappointment. Even with the excitement of seeing bubble and squeak, it was a real let down; luke warm, and the sausages in particular tasted really artificially flavoured.

Thanks to the power of twitter, I can look back on all the many and varied Full English breakfasts that I’ve (mostly) enjoyed:

👉🏻 https://twitter.com/search?q=rmoff%20%23fullenglish&src=typd

What makes a good Full English?

• Good ingredients, cooked well. Nothing worse than a limp pink sausage, as it were.
• Sausage, standard pork or Cumberland at most. Definitely no daft apricot and guava bean with a hint of foie gras nonsense. Must be cooked right well, crispy skin, almost burnt.
• Bacon, starting to crisp (but not deep fried and crisp-like as the Americans do it - it should bend if you pick it up)
• Black Pudding, seriously. Grim idea when you think about it (blood sausage) but so very tasty, and binds the other components together
• Fried eggs with runny yolks
• Scrambled eggs are making an appearance more recently too, after 30 years of not really caring for them. The dodgy “scrambled egg” that you get in some hotels I think straight from a packet mix are crap though and best avoided.
• Hash browns. Controversial, and often a bit greasy - but I’d never pass one by
• Fried slice - sadly all too often missing. I’ll forego hash browns if there’s a fried slice
• Tomatoes, but only if there’s more tomato than stalk as often happens
• Mushrooms, thicky chopped so there’s something to it - and certainly not the wussy sliced things that you get sitting in a pool of black greasy water at some fryup buffets
• Baked beans
• Good white toast
• HP Sauce - although I’ve realised recently that a really good fryup doesn’t actually need any sauce. But if it’s subpar and/or cheap ingrediants – gotta have HP sauce (and definitely not that awful “brown sauce” that you get in sachets and tastes grim).