How to Make A Full Scottish Breakfast

It is naturally the meat components of a full Scottish breakfast which will require the longest time to cook and they will thus require to be attended to first. Enough sunflower oil should be added to the large frying pan to comfortably cover the base and the link sausages only added. Please do not prick the sausages with a fork. All this serves tio do is allow the juices and thus the flavour and mosture to run out in to the pan, leaving your cooked sausages dry and tasteless. Keep the heat under the pan very low and the sausages should not burst.

After ten minutes, turn the links and add the Lorne sausage and black pudding to the pan. Put a plate in to your oven and turn the oven on to a very low heat. (Make sure the plate is ovenproof!) Turn the Lorne sausage and the black pudding after five minutes and cook for a further five minutes. This will mean twenty minutes' cooking time for the beef links and ten minutes each for the Lorne sausage and black pudding.

Remove the plate from the oven with oven gloves and sit it on a wooden chopping board. Remove the sausages and black pudding from the frying pan with the cooking tongs and sit them on the plate. Still wearing the oven gloves, place the sheet of tinfoil (shiny side down) over the plate and tuck it in around the edges to form a seal. That will keep the items warm while the remainder of the breakfast is cooked.

When the sausages and black pudding have been removed from the first frying pan, the tomato and mushrooms should be added. The tomato should be halved with a sharp knife and each half sat in the pan flesh (flat) side down. The mushrooms should be wiped clean and although I normally eat the stalks of mushrooms, when frying them, I remove and discard the stalks for easier cooking. The mushrooms should firstly be put in the pan with the cup uppermost and turned after two or three minutes.

The egg should be broken in to a small bowl or cup. This will make it much easier to pour it carefully on to the bread. A hole should be made in the centre of the bread with an egg cup and the small disc of bread discarded.

Sunflower oil should be added to the second frying pan and brought up to a medium heat. The bread should be added and the egg carefully poured on top so that the yolk sits in the hole. Do not move the bread around the pan in any way, as this will be likely to break the yolk at this early stage and spoil presentation. After around three minutes, very carefully turn the bread over with a spatula and fry for a further three minutes on the second side.

When the egg has been added to the pan, the bacon should be placed on a grill pan and under a hot grill for two to three minutes each side until done.

A full Scottish breakfast can be plated up in any desired fashion and this will of course largely depend upon the component ingredients. In this instance, I have uncovered the sausages and black pudding and transferred them to the serving plate. I have arranged the bacon as a bed for the bread and egg and sat the tomatoes and mushrooms around the plate at random. Tomato ketchup or HP Sauce is optional and is best placed on the table for people to help themselves.

There are doubtlessly people who will read this and be horrified that I haven't incorporated such as tattie scones in my full Scottish breakfast recipe. The reason why I have omitted this most delectable of Scottish ingredients is simply that I wanted to make the egg and bread combination. That is not something which is typical of a full Scottish breakfast but rather my own creation. A traditional fried egg will normally be served, together with either fried bread or a fried tattie scone.

Equally, baked beans in tomato sauce may be a surprise omission. The reason for the omission here is that while I can eat baked beans at the right time, they are not something I personally like on my breakfast plate.

Fried onions are another option but again, they are something I prefer to include when my fry up is eaten at either lunch or dinner time, rather than first thing in the morning.

This page is designed as a starter for ten in many ways. Come up with your own ideas, explore the Web and see what else is often eaten as part of a full Scottish or full Englsh breakfast and experiment until you find the combination you and your family most prefer.