Previously, on tastingmenu.wordpress.com –
* https://tastingmenu.wordpress.com/2024/03/17/nobu-creamy-spicy-scallops-dynamite/
A long time ago when I was working in Manhattan, I used to grab a ‘Manhattan’ bagel breakfast sandwich at a deli sitting on W32nd St/Broadway…….fast forward years into the future….Recently, the weather was rather rainy here and I didn’t feel like going outside to grab some breakfast. Fortunately I had bagels from my local Brueggers. And THAT got me thinking. I knew how to quickly make bacon in my oven; I had red onions, red bell pepper, I had some cheese…….. and it dawned on me to try to make a variation of the Bruegger ‘Western’ breakfast bagel. As it would turn out, I didn’t have any cheddar, but I did have muenster cheese which seemed like a good substitute. And at that moment, while I didn’t have any chipotle sauce, I thought I could do just as well with Nobu’s creamy spicy sauce.
So I began by mixing up a little of the Nobu creamy spicy sauce for that added rich spicy taste.
I needed to follow that up with a little thinly sliced red onion and red bell pepper and cracking an egg
followed up with setting out 2 slices of bacon and splitting a Brueggers everything bagel.
So I got my bacon into the oven for 7 minutes at 400 degrees F and started on my over medium egg.
Once my bacon was done, I could start assembling my breakfast sandwich.
I wanted to be really careful about the use of the creamy spicy sauce since, from experience, sometimes they used way too much of the chipotle sauce at my local branch of Brueggers in making their Western
sandwich. Then I started layering the egg, then the cheese that was followed by folded strips of bacon. I
could then finally top all that with a layer of the bell pepper and the red onion slivers.
This breakfast sandwich turned out the way I wanted/expected. Some would wonder why I didn’t want to try and make a chipotle mayonnaise for this sandwich. To that I would argue that there was plenty of the smokiness aspect coming from the North Country bacon product that I was using and there was enough spice coming from the chilis in the creamy spicy sauce (not to mention the garlic that was inherited from the chili garlic sauce component). I thought the spiciness was rather subtle and slowly built on the palate as one ate the sandwich. I liked the way this turned out and I actually prefer this flavor combination with the creamy spicy sauce to the proprietary Bruggers chipotle mayonnaise sauce given the smoked bacon I was using. I also thought the muenster substitution allowed me to taste the cheese umami without the brashness of the cheddar which I thought balanced better with the egg/bacon combination. Maybe this is the breakfast sandwich I should be looking to going forward.
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