Bacon and Egg Muffins
A rasher lining each hole, an egg cracked in, and twelve minutes. The bacon is the case, so there is no pastry and nothing to make.
- Prep
- 10 min
- Cook
- 15 min
- Resting
- 3 min
- Total
- 28 min
- Serves
- 4
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Eggs
- Milk
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Muffins
To serve
Method
Muffins
Heat the oven to 190C fan and butter eight holes of a muffin tin thoroughly, including the rims.
Line each hole with a rasher of streaky bacon, pressing it around the sides in a ring with the ends overlapping.
Streaky and thin-cut, not back bacon. Streaky is fatty enough to crisp in the time an egg takes and thin enough to bend into a circle without tearing.
Bake the empty bacon cases for 5 minutes. This renders some fat and sets the shape, so the bacon does not shrink away from the egg later.
Take the tin out and scatter a little cheese into the bottom of each case.
Crack an egg into each one. Break it into a cup first if you are not confident — a broken yolk here is unrecoverable.
Grind pepper over and bake for 10 to 12 minutes for a set white and a soft yolk, or 14 for a firm one.
Check at 10 minutes: the whites should be opaque all the way to the middle with no clear jelly left, and the yolk should still wobble.
To serve
Let them sit in the tin for 3 minutes before lifting them out with a spoon. Straight from the oven they tear; three minutes and they come out whole.
Scatter with chives and serve.
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What to expect
- Taste
Bacon and egg, and nothing else pretending otherwise. The cheese adds salt and the pepper does more work than usual because there is so little else in it.
- Aroma
Bacon rendering in an oven.
- Texture
The contrast of a crisp bacon rim against soft set white and a liquid yolk. If the bacon is not crisp the dish loses its only textural idea.
- Sound
Very little.
- How the flavour moves
Salt first, then the egg, then the yolk when it breaks.
- Serve it
Hot, after three minutes in the tin.
- Goes with
Toast. Coffee. A grilled tomato.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Beginner.
- Cost
Very low.
- Equipment
A muffin tin.
- When to make it
Brunch, or a batch for the week.
- Best season
None.
- You know it is done when
The whites opaque all the way to the centre with no clear jelly left, and the yolk still visibly wobbling when the tin is nudged.
- And it feels like
Crisp bacon rim, set white, soft yolk.
- Food safety
A soft yolk is not fully cooked. Anyone pregnant, very young, elderly or immunocompromised should either cook them to 14 minutes for a firm yolk or use eggs stamped with the British Lion mark, which come from vaccinated flocks and are considered safe to eat runny.
- Where it goes wrong
- Back bacon, which will not bend or crisp.
- Skipping the five-minute pre-bake, so the bacon shrinks away from the egg.
- Large eggs, which overflow.
- Not buttering the rims, where the white welds itself on.
- Lifting them out immediately, when they tear.
- Overbaking, which is easy — the window between soft and hard yolk is about three minutes.
- If it does go wrong
Stuck: the rims were not buttered; run a knife round and use more butter next time. Broken on lifting: they needed the three minutes. Overflowing: the eggs were too large. Bacon flabby: the oven was too cool or the bacon too thick.
- Making it ahead
Line the tin the night before and refrigerate. The baking is 15 minutes.
- Keeping it
Two days in the fridge.
- Reheating
An oven at 170C for 6 minutes. The yolk will set completely, so cook them firm in the first place if you plan to reheat.
- Freezing
No.
- Leftovers
Cold in a lunchbox, which is genuinely good.
- Scaling it
One tin at a time; two trays cook unevenly unless swapped halfway.
- Substitutions
Medium eggs rather than large: a large egg overflows a standard muffin hole once the bacon has taken up some of the space. Pancetta or thin prosciutto both work.
- Dietary swaps
Contains eggs and milk from the cheese and butter. Naturally gluten free, which is unusual for a breakfast dish and worth knowing. Nut free.
- Shopping for it
Thin-cut streaky bacon, which some supermarkets sell as 'thin' or 'pancetta-style'.
- Keeping the cost down
Very cheap. Eight rashers and eight eggs feeds four.
- Sustainability
Eggs and a small amount of pork, which is about as light as a cooked breakfast gets. Two rashers a head is a modest quantity, and the version with spinach or tomato in the base and no cheese is lighter again without losing anything much. Higher-welfare eggs are the choice worth making here, since eggs are the bulk of the dish and the price difference on eight of them is small.
- Nutrition
High protein, low carbohydrate, and among the more nutritionally straightforward breakfasts here.
- Worth it?
Five minutes of baking an empty ring of bacon, and the dish stops having a gap in the middle.
Where it comes from
- Origin
No particular one.
- Also called
None.
- Said out loud
Straightforward.
- What the name means
Descriptive, and the 'muffin' refers to the tin rather than to any muffin.
- History
This is a recipe with no history and it is more honest to say so than to manufacture one. Bacon and eggs together are a very old British and American pairing; baking them in a muffin tin is a modern convenience that spread through recipe blogs, and its popularity owes a good deal to how well it photographs.
- Why it matters
None to speak of. It is a useful recipe rather than a meaningful one.
- When it is eaten
Brunch for several people, a buffet, or a breakfast that can be made in one batch and eaten with the hands.
- The traditional way
None.
- How it changed
Nothing to change.
- Regional variations
None.
- How this version differs
The five-minute pre-bake of the empty cases, which most versions omit and which is what stops the bacon shrinking away from the egg and leaving a gap.
- Sources and credit
None.
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