The full English 7-layer dip

beanz on toast

Hi, clowns!

Sorry about the unexpected break. The first anniversary of my dad’s passing happened (most of you were around back then), and I wanted to give my family my full attention. Then Davida and I both got horrible colds, and guess what? Now I currently have explosive diarrhea.

Listen. I bare my soul to you like this so you understand the true power of food writing. I mean, all that food has to end up somewhere, you know? Why isn’t there a James Beard Award category for “Butt Stuff?” Probably because I would sweep it every year.

[On a slightly more serious note, we’re doing our best to hang in there. Grief is a weird thing. You guys have always been so sweet and supportive of us, and that has helped more than you know.]

This week’s edition of Food is Stupid is inspired by a really weird impulse purchase I made online recently.

I, uh, bought a 12-pack of British baked beans. These were specifically Heinz brand “Beanz.” It wasn’t even for the newsletter, either. Every time I see these things at the store, they’re about $5 a can, and I always balk at the price. This 12-pack I got was like $32, which comes down to like $2.66 per can, and it seemed like a much better deal. Let’s ignore the basic fact that I spent $32 on beans rather than $5, but it’s the principle of the matter, please hop off my junk.

I had basically just been curious as to how these beans are different from American ones, since all the sentiment I’ve seen online involves British folk saying that their beans are the best. That’s a bold statement.

Upon trying some, I learned that they are basically just beans in a savory and smooth tomato sauce. While they’re a little sweet, that’s not their main characteristic, unlike American baked beans. They kind of have a Chef Boyardee vibe going on. Would the UK be mad if I called them Chef Boyardee beans? Is Chef Boyardee even allowed in England due to visa issues?

Anyway, Davida and I were then discussing all the things you associate with British baked beans, like beans on toast (I still do not understand this), beans on jacket potatoes (not to be confused with jack-off potatoes), and of course, a full English breakfast.

Full English breakfasts are intense, man.

They include things like back bacon (more on that later), a banger (the sausage, not a sick tune), black pudding (blood sausage), mushrooms, broiled tomatoes, eggs, and those beans. I realize that we are in an era where people no longer need to eat 1,200 calorie meals to go out and plow the fields all morning, but damn. That’s some serious meat on meat action.

But what could we do with that many ingredients?

Davida suggested a seven-layer dip. Ah yes, this would be sort of like a taco dip, but English style. This is triple-fusion, when you think about it. Taco dip is kinda Tex-Mex, which makes it Mexican-American, then applying that idea to English cuisine makes it Mexican-American-British. This childlike logic is why I am widely hailed as a 44-year-old child prodigy.

So I already had the beans down, but I would also need some very specific ingredients that you can’t get at most grocery stores, like the bangers, back bacon, and blood sausage.

Fortunately, thanks to living in Chicago, we have access to some pretty cool grocery stores. So I braved the dangerous streets (according to hilariously terrified dudes in Oakleys who have only driven through Schaumburg) and went to Gene’s Sausage Shop, which had all three things I needed. Gene’s also sells Heinz Beanz, but don’t worry, I already had a better price per can.

I first tackled the vegetable components of the breakfast, starting with the mushrooms.

This ramekin you see filled with cooked-down ‘shrooms is the world’s entire yearly harvest. It’s wild how shrinky they get once you cook the moisture out of them.

The few English breakfasts I’ve had usually featured a slice of broiled tomato or two.

Since I didn’t feel like getting the house all smoky, I decided to go outside and grill them to get some char on them. And these tomatoes I bought were fantastic. By fantastic, I mean they were as hard as a rock and could be used as a projectile weapon.

Once they cooled off, I chopped them up into a mash and set them aside in a container for later.

Next up was all the meats, starting with the back bacon.

Back bacon is pretty cool because it’s different from tummy bacon. It’s cut from the loin, so it’s mostly lean (think pork tenderloin), for those of you who complain that regular bacon is too fatty. My main issue with this shit is that because it’s almost all meat, it cooks up chewy rather than crispy. Gimme that artery-clogging shit.

Once I cooked the bacon, I also cooked off slices of the black pudding and a few of the whole bangers.

Then I chopped everything up into fine bits.

I sort of hemmed and hawed over the egg part, though. That’s because a full English breakfast usually has fried eggs with it, but that would be impossible to put into a layered dip. So I just went with hard-boiled ones and sliced them into circles using the finest knife work known to man.

It was now time for the base of the dip, which would be my precious beans.

This is just a reminder to all of you that the mini food processor attachment to my immersion blender has the best crack in it ever.

I mean, every food processor needs a little window up top so you can watch helplessly as beans spray up in your face when you turn it on.

If there’s one thing that’s convenient about canned beans, it’s that they’re nice and soft, and they blend really well.

I’ll have to remember that in case I ever have oral surgery and still want some fiber in my diet. Just because my mouth’s out of commission doesn’t mean my ass has to be, you know?

I spooned in my foundational layer of beans, then started to build the rest of the stuff on top, starting with the diced banger.

I have had bangers and mash a few times. Even though they look like stubby bratwursts, bangers are really mild in flavor with a super smooth consistency, and are best drowned in onion gravy. Or, placed on top of a bed of pureed beans.

I then added the rest of the meat, including the blood sausage and the bits of back bacon.

Next came the veggie layers, with the finely diced mushrooms and the mashed up tomatoes, which now resembled a sort of fire-roasted salsa.

Finally, I topped the entire thing with a layer of sliced hard-boiled eggs and cut up a side of buttered toast points, which is a fancy way of saying “crustless Butternut white bread.”

As I was putting the finishing touches on this thing, Davida said, “I think this is the most actual cooking I’ve seen you do for the newsletter in a long time.”

I thought about it for a minute, and realized she was right. I’d gone outside to grill tomatoes, diced and cooked down mushrooms, cooked and chopped up three types of meat, hard boiled and sliced eggs, blended beans; I was sort of worn out.

“You don’t even put this much effort into anything you make us for dinner,” she said. I looked at her for a second. She was totally right. Then we both had a good laugh. We would end up eating frozen pizza for dinner that night.

The one thing I didn’t anticipate was how hard it would be to eat dip that was assembled vertically in a glass.

There was no way the bread would stand up to aggressive scooping, so I ended up resorting to the use of a long Korean spoon. Then everything just sort of tumbled off the bread once I put it on there. Cool.

Of course, it’s not a true English breakfast if you don’t add a dab of HP Sauce on top.

Being American, HP Sauce has my shit all fucked up. That’s because it looks like A.1. Sauce, which is one of the greatest sauces known to mankind. I would sleep in a kiddie pool of A.1. if I could. HP Sauce doesn’t quite taste like A.1., though it’s not dissimilar. It’s tangy, a little sweet, and unfortunately on top of this toast point with the dip, it hijacked the entire bite of food. As in, I couldn’t taste a single one of the seven-layer ingredients aside from maybe a bit of salt from the bacon.

My next bite of the dip on toast was naked, and it turns out that wow, mashed together into one bite, this stuff is all collectively bland. I know people like to rip into British cuisine because it’s not all that seasoned, but upon further consideration, the individual components aren’t aggressively flavored in one way or the other, aside from maybe some salt. So the end result is plain on top of plain.

This is kind of amazing, because I think full English breakfasts are awesome. All those different meats and sides, you know? But none of those things have a noticeable amount of garlic, onion, chili, or anything, so you just get a mix of somewhat salty and fatty. I guess that is why everyone is so insistent on having HP Sauce with one of these plates.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not talking smack. I will 100% eat the shit out of one of these plates whenever I get the chance. In fact, I respect a full English more since I realize how much work it is to actually put one together. And now I understand why the British love beans on toast so damn much in a roundabout way. Because given the option to make that versus a full breakfast, I know what I’m picking.

Good thing I have plenty of beans.

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Okay, clowns, if you enjoyed today’s bean-fueled British voyage, feel free to share today’s edition of the newsletter (and don’t forget to hit that heart button!), since this one’s a freebie:

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Wouldn’t you want to support the greatest food writer in all of history? I mean, obviously. But, you get double the newsletter, plus access to a fuckton of archives (almost six years worth, now). I’ve gone viral multiple times, I show up in random places on the internet, wouldn’t you want to get that shit straight from the tap? I would.

Lastly, before I go, just wanted to give a quick shoutout to my friend

Bennett Rea

, otherwise known as Cookin’ With Congress. Some of you guys ended up here because he mentioned me in his newsletter, which you should sign up for too.

Bennett puts out some incredible shit via social media channels like TikTok and Instagram, where he tells you about shit that politicians eat, then he tries doing it too. (You’d think that power would buy better taste, but most of the time, it doesn’t.)

As always, I love you all, and I’m still deciding whether or not I’ll be posting next Friday, since it’s the 4th of July. If I don’t, just try and keep all of your fingers until we meet again, okay?