Binging with Babish: Egg Sandwich from Birds of Prey

What a way to start my new life. The perfect egg sandwich. I love you. Bacon, egg, cheese, and just a dash of hot sauce. Not too much, Sal. I wanna taste that cheese. Hey, what's up, guys? Welcome back to Binging with Babish, where this week we're taking a look at the perfect egg sandwich from Birds of Prey. Now, as Margot Robbie mentioned during her interview on Hot Ones, she is allergic to chicken eggs. As such, her egg sandwich was made with duck eggs, which luckily I have a few leftover from that episode the other week. But for now, we gotta make the bread in question, which to me looked like ciabatta. We're gonna start by making a pre-ferment of 177 grams of all-purpose flour, a 16th of a teaspoon of instant yeast, and 177 grams of room-temperature water in this recipe from King Arthur Flour. We're gonna mix that together until it resembles a slightly too-thick pancake batter wrapped tightly in plastic wrap. Let it sit at room temperature for eight hours and then refrigerate overnight, after which point it will look something like this, a little bit darker with lots of tiny little bubbles. And unlike the initial mixture of water and flour, it has become stretchy, gloopy, and a little smelly in a nice fermenty kind of way. Now onto the main dough. We need to measure out 361 grams of all-purpose flour, add one packet or about seven grams of instant yeast, two teaspoons or about 12 grams of kosher salt, two tablespoons or about 14 grams of instant nonfat milk, the entirety of our pre-ferment, which is gonna give our ciabatta some deeper, more complex flavor, 152 grams of lukewarm water, and three tablespoons or about 35 grams of olive oil. Go ahead and lower your mixer head with the pet, whoop, what the hell was that? Oh, it was the little thing that goes in the thing. Once you have your thing all dry, just shove it in the thing and make sure that the thing is tight. Then once all of your things are in the right place, it's time to crank on the mixer and give this dough a light mix using the paddle attachment until it just comes together, at which point we're gonna scrape the dough off the paddle and affix dough hooks, getting ready to knead this guy on medium-low speed for seven to eight minutes until it's smooth and shiny and sticky, and as Paul Hollywood would say, a bit slack. Ciabatta dough is indeed a very high-hydration dough, but it's gonna become much more handleable after it's hung out in a well-oiled bowl for about three hours. First, we're gonna use the dough's stickiness to roll it taut like this before dropping in the bowl, covering tightly with plastic wrap and letting it sit at room temperature for two to three hours or until it has more than doubled in size. Now, next up, we wanna encourage gluten development without deflating all the beautiful bubbles in our dough, so using an oiled rubber spatula, we're gonna fold the dough in on itself, turning the bowl as we go eight times. Now, I know what you're saying. Babish, that's not gonna do anything. Well, hang on to your pants because we're covering it, letting it rest for another 30 minutes, and then doing it again. Now, I know what you're saying. Babish, that's also not gonna do anything. Well, you know what? It totally does, so what do you have to say to that? That's what I thought. Anyway, after another 30 minutes, we are turning our dough out onto a well-floured work surface and coaxing it out into a large rectangle, popping any huge bubbles you see as you go, but trying to maintain the smaller ones, and then we're trimming it down to our desired sizes. The loaves in the movie kinda look like a six-inch sandwich loaf to me, so I'm going with maybe a four-by-six or four-by-eight-inch rectangle, all of which I'm gonna place on a heavily floured piece of parchment paper set in a rimmed baking sheet, which I can then cover with an inverted rimmed baking sheet to let these guys proof at room temperature for one hour. Much easier and much less sticky than plastic wrap. Then I'm gonna cut the parchment in half, spritz these guys down generously with plain old water, sprinkle with a little bit more flour, and then using a pizza peel, I'm gonna drop them onto a preheated pizza stone set in a 450-degree Fahrenheit oven. There they shall bake for 18 to 20 minutes until browned and puffed and smelling just totally, completely awesome. I'm gonna brush off some of the excess flour, and then we're gonna let these guys cool on a rack for at least one hour, both for the sake of our delicate little fingers and because we don't wanna ruin the bread's texture by cutting into it too soon. Then I'm gonna use a shallow rimmed baking sheet as a sort of cutting template, utilizing a long bread knife so we can get this thing sandwich-ready. Now, over on the stovetop, we're putting four thin slices of bacon in a heavy cast iron pan, topping those with about a half a cup of water and setting over medium heat. This helps more fat render out from the bacon so it cooks a little bit more evenly. Once all the water has evaporated and the bacon begins to brown, go ahead and give it a flip and cook it to your degree of desired doneness. Then we're obviously gonna throw away all this disgusting bacon grease. I'm just kidding. Let's throw the ciabatta down in the bacon fat. I know Sal uses a brush to apply the bacon fat in the movie, but he was working on a big old flat top and I'm just making everything in one pan. So back into the pan goes a little bit of extra bacon fat and Sal cracks both eggs with one hand at the same time. So I'm gonna see if I can do the same. Try not to squeeze too hard. Oh, I'm gonna break the yolk. I'm gonna break the yolk. I didn't break the yolk. Maybe this isn't so hard to, oh, okay. That seems a little more like me. Don't worry, none of this egg is gonna go to waste. There's always room for an ugly breakfast sandwich in the Babish household. And much more carefully into the pan go the two duck's eggs. We are frying these bad boys sunny side up, waiting for the edges to get nice and brown and crispy and most of the whites to set. Fastuning them with two slices of American cheese and covering until the cheese melts and the whites are completely set with the yolk still runny. Then it looked to me like Sal was using red devil hot sauce in the movie. So I'm gonna hit it with a few glugs and then top up the bacon on the bottom half of the sandwich with the eggs and cheese and bring it over to the worktop for final assembly. Then true to bodega sandwich form, we're gonna wrap this guy in parchment paper. To do so, I'm gonna fold up both sides over the top of the sandwich and start creasing down about an inch wide strip till I reach the sandwich itself and then press it down flat and then it's time to tuck in the sides. We're gonna start by pressing the bottom half of the wrapper underneath the sandwich and then tucking the top half in over top of that. I don't know wrapping vernacular guys, I'm sorry. There are probably other YouTube channels that show you how to do this really, really clearly and concisely but hopefully you get the gist from looking at it. Then we're gonna cut the sandwich in half through the paper and leaving it connected at the bottom so we can do the famous egg sandwich cut in half shot. Gorgeous. I was pretty excited to try this because I wasn't sure how it would taste with duck eggs. First, let me just give this sandwich a little scoot out the wrapper and I gotta say, I was pleasantly surprised. If anything, duck eggs just have a more intense egg flavor with just a hint of kind of a grassy sweetness and ciabatta makes for a great breakfast sandwich vessel. It's chewy and flavorful but it's also light and tender enough that it's not squishing everything around. Now I'm just gonna eat this as fast as I can before Rosie Perez makes me drop it.