Will it press - Bacon and Eggs

As I knew I would be making bagels, I offered to make breakfast bagels for the early starters on the support team. Except my early morning bagel baking, combined with a cancelled train meant I couldn't make it in before they left for breakfast on Monday, and I don't have their phone numbers, so I couldn't tell them I was running late. So breakfast bagel day was delayed to today. This is the one that they usually buy in the mornings:

Of course, I couldn't turn down an opportunity for another "Will it press?" experiment, but after talking it over at dinner with the family, there were some constraints that I had to place:

•  No bacon or egg could touch the grill itself, nor any bacon fat. Some people at the office aren't able to eat bacon for religious reasons, and one person in the office is vegan, so I didn't want to cross contaminate the grill.
• No strong bacon smell should linger in the kitchen. Though all the early starters said they love the smell of bacon, I don't think everyone in the office agrees.

What I ended up using:

• butter (because Roger said he loves bacon cooked with butter)
• one egg per bagel
• two strips of bacon per bagel
• aluminium foil (it says it's "heavy duty", but all of them said that, so I don't know if it's really any different to regular aluminium foil from the supermarket, but I wanted to prevent tears)
• egg flipper

To cook the bacon, I had the idea of wrapping it in foil. After the dismal attempt at cooking pancakes using baking paper, I thought foil would be better at transferring heat. I've used foil to line public BBQs before, and found that oil still tends to leak through where the two pieces of foil overlap. So I decided to double wrap it. Once to completely encase the pieces of bacon, and then seam-side down, encased in another foil wrap, so even if the oil leaked out of the first wrapper, it would get caught in the second.

I simply sandwiched it in the press, and left it for a minute. 

After a minute, I lifted the press to take a look, and the package ballooned like this:

I figured it was steam, so I unwrapped the foil a little and let the steam out. The bacon wasn't really cooked at this point, so I put it on for another couple of minutes.

It ended up being the soft-cooked bacon, which Other Anthony said is how he prefers it. I forgot to take a photo of it, unfortunately, but here it is on top of one of the bagels:

 The egg was the trickier part. Both Other Anthony and Roger said they preferred eggs sunny-side up, which meant that I couldn't really press the egg. My first attempt was to see if the press was hot enough to cook the egg. I melted a bit of butter to grease the foil, and cracked the egg. It took a while, but eventually, the egg did cook, but it didn't have the proper browned look of a regular fried egg.

It was really easy to make a sunny-side up egg though, as the yolk didn't really cook at all (was just a bit cooked on the bottom). The only problem I had was that the egg stuck to the foil. I added extra butter for the second and third attempts, which made the egg a bit easier to remove, but I didn't want to drown the egg in butter, so I didn't add too much.

 Lastly, I halved and toasted the bagels (which was pretty tough, as the bagels were already so thin!), put it together, and served. :)

I accidentally left Darren's bacon in the grill too long, so it ended up being the crispy kind, but luckily, he said he prefers it that way.

Other Anthony, Roger and Darren were all really happy to get breakfast in the morning, and Anthony and Peter caught me in the kitchen making the bagels and were jealous they didn't get any. Although, Anthony did offer to buy me a breakfast bagel tomorrow morning, but I have my regular breakfast, so I turned him down.

So yes, you can press bacon and eggs (if you call what I did with the eggs "pressing" it).