Ingredients:
"Tube" breakfast sausage, or ground breakfast sausage. Anything but premade patties.
1 everything bagel
Red onion - 3 passes on a mandolin, or as thin a disc as you can cut with your knife
1 leaf romaine lettuce
1 stalk green onion
1 slice cheese (I use deli style white American, but use whatever you want)
Olive Oil or whatever kind of oil you like.
Sauce:
Maple Syrup
Hot Sauce
Honey Mustard
Dijon Mustard (or Spicy Brown Mustard)
Mayo
Salt
Pepper
Equipment:
Pan you can get pretty hot. I use a 14" cast iron
Mandolin (Optional if you are good with a knife or don't mind thicker slices of red onion)
Cutting board
Parchment paper
Toaster
Spatula (Like a burger flipping type of spatula, not a "fold whipped egg whites into a mousse" type spatula)
Cooking Process:
-Red Onion and Bagel-
-Slice your red onion. I do three passes on a mandolin (a crappy non-adjustable mandolin, so the slices are like 1/4" thick)
-Heat your pan to like 6-7 out of 10
-Once it's hot, put in some olive oil and swirl it around (I use a squeeze bottle and use probably 1 tsp of oil?)
-Put the onion in and toss in the oil.
-Reduce the heat to like 4-5 out of 10
Alternative Red Onion Method: In the past, instead of a few small slices of onion, I have done just 1 huge, 1/2"+ disc. If you don't have a mandolin and don't want to try thin slicing with a chef's knife, this alternate method would work well
Place in the oil and just let it sit at like a 4 out of 10 for a good long while until it gets medium soft and translucent throughout.
I drizzle a small amount of oil on top to hopefully penetrate between the rings while it cooks and also some salt and pepper.
Flip once or thrice until it is fully cooked, to your preferred level of softness, and do your level best NOT to separate the rings.
Put aside when complete (See below about where is a good place to put it)
/End Alternate Red Onion Method
-While the onions are cooking put the bagel in the toaster and aim for pretty well toasted. Not burnt anywhere, but crispy and browned on the faces
-Once the toaster pops, pull the bagel and put the cheese on the top half of the bagel so it can melt
-Stir the onions while they soften. Probably 5ish minutes
-Pour a small drizzle of maple syrup on the red onions while still in the pan and stir constantly to coat
-Remove from pan and set aside. I generally put it on top of the top half of the bagel with the cheese, so it will melt some more
-Sausage, Greens, Sauce-
Sausage:
-At this point I generally run a small amount of water in my pan while it's still very hot and scrape with my spatula to get all the onion/maple syrup fond out of the pan and then a quick rinse and pour into the sink.
-Put back on the heat and adjust to 7 out of 10
-While it is heating, cut a piece of parchment paper (I generally pull an 8" x 16" (or however wide the box is) piece out)
-Fold it in half
-For a "standard" size tube of sausage, I cut/squeeze out a roughly 1.5" - 2" log/ball of sausage
-Open the parchment paper and place the sausage "ball" on it
-Fold the parchment paper back over the sausage and either with your hands or a meat mallet, flatten the sausage out until it's just under 1/2" (It will look huge, but it shrinks quite a bit in the pan)
-Peel back the parchment from one face of the sausage and salt and pepper the patty
-Squeeze/drizzle a small amount of oil into the pan once it's up to temp and swirl
-Place the sausage patty, face side down, into the oil. Press down gently on the parchment paper to make the sausage patty "stick" a bit to the pan so removing the parchment is a bit easier
-Peel off the parchment paper and discard
-Salt and pepper the top of the sausage patty and don't touch it at all while it cooks
-While the sausage is cooking, prep the romaine, green onion, and sauce
Greens:
-Wash, trim, and chiffonade the leaf of romaine
-Wash, trim, and slice on the bias, (I go well past 45' so as to get very thin slices, like in a ramen bowl) the stalk of green onion
Sauce:
-In a small bowl, add (I measure with my heart, but I will take a stab at measurements)
Roughly:
1-2 tsp of whatever hot sauce you like. I like it pretty hot (I want to notice it's there) so I use a habanero based hot sauce
1-2 tsp of maple syrup
1-2 tsp of honey mustard
1-2 tsp of dijon/spicy brown mustard
1-2 tsp of mayo
-Stir
-At this point, the sausage is probably ready to be flipped. You are looking for a good amount of color on the meat. It should be well browned on at least one side
Begin sandwich assembly:
-On the bottom of the bagel, spoon a decent amount of sauce
-Toss together the green onions and romaine lettuce
-Gather together and place the lettuce/green onion pile on top of the sauce
-Spoon a little bit of sauce on top of the greens (You could also, if you are ok with an already messy sandwich being even more messy, just toss the greens in the sauce vs spooning it on)
-Once the sausage is done, remove and place on top of the sauced greens
-At this point you should have the top of the bagel with a slice of cheese and the cooked red onions, and the bottom of the bagel with the sauce and greens and the patty
-Mating the two halves can be tricky. I grab the bottom half and secure the stack by lightly pinching the patty down with my hand, securing the greens from all falling out, and then place that, upside down onto the top half of the bagel
-Optional: Place the sandwich on the cutting board and take a sharp serrated knife and slice the sandwich in half and then gently plate (in such a way that each half doesn't topple over)
-Serve the remaining sauce on the side (I like to spoon some on each bite, or just dunk)
-Understand this is a greasy sloppy sandwich and you are going to wear some of it.
-Optional over-the-top add-on: fry up a McDonald's-style hashbrown and slot that into the sandwich somewhere
-Enjoy