The Perfect Full English Breakfast

A few weeks ago Rate My Sausage asked readers to tell us which ingredients they would include in their perfect Full English breakfast (FEB).  The results are now in and fully analysed....But first of all let’s look at the various parts of the FEB.  There are several very separate components of the meal, but each is equally as important as the others.  We think you need to include at least one item from each of the following categories:

Meat:  e.g. bacon, sausages

Eggs: fried, scrambled, poached, or your own favourite way?

Dry goods:  savoury and salty, e.g. black pudding, chips, hash browns

Wet goods: tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans?  To add moisture

Bread:  toasted?  Or simply buttered?

Drinks: to wash it all down – tea, coffee, orange juice, or something else?

So that’s six parts of your meal that you need to address, giving a minimum of six ingredients you’d think.  However, our poll received a total of 1,723 votes from 194 replies, and that equates to an average of 8.8 breakfast items per reader.  We’ve rounded that to the nearest integer, so our ideal FEB will include nine items.  Hearty indeed. 

So, taking this ideal number on board, we settled on: meat (2 options), eggs (1),  dry goods (2), wet goods (2), bread (1), drinks (1), as follows (please forgive some shonky photography, my excuse is that I was hungry and impatient):

Meat:

Bacon was the most popular item overall (chosen by 96.4% of voters), and therefore the most popular meat item.  Of course, sausages are also included, being the second most popular item overall (93.3%).

Eggs:

Some people want more than one type of egg on their plate, with a total of 220 votes for eggs from 194 voters.  In our version we’ve included just one, the overwhelming favourite – the fried egg, voted for by 79.4%.  Others were poached eggs (12.4%) and scrambled eggs (21.6%).

Dry goods:

Hash browns (55.2%) and black pudding (53.6%) were the two most popular items, therefore included in our meal.  Perhaps surprisingly, chips earned votes from just 3.1% of voters.

Wet goods:

A very hotly contested category, attracting a total of 401 votes (2.1 per voter).  It was a close run thing with mushrooms (82.0%) and baked beans (67.0%) just pipping tomatoes (60.3%) onto our plate.

Bread:

An easy victory for toast, which was voted for by 76.8% of the poll, compared to just 35.1% voting for bread and butter.

Drinks:

Tea, coffee or orange juice, do you reckon?  Well coffee was the rank outsider (35.1% - I wonder if it was the same people that voted for bread and butter?), with the winning drink just one vote ahead of the runner-up.  Get the kettle on and make yourself some tea (58.8%), and leave the orange juice (58.2%) in the fridge.

Add all this together and your perfect Rate My Sausage Full English Breakfast looks a little like this:

Complete results:

	Votes	Share
Bacon	187	96.4
Sausage	181	93.3
Mushrooms	159	82.0
Fried Egg	154	79.4
Toast	149	76.8
Baked Beans	130	67.0
Tomato	117	60.3
Tea	114	58.8
Orange Juice	113	58.2
Hash Brown	107	55.2
Black Pudding	104	53.6
Bread & Butter	68	35.1
Coffee	68	35.1
Scrambled Egg	42	21.6
Poached Egg	24	12.4
Chips	6	3.1
Total Votes	1723
Number of Voters	194
Average items =	8.88