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Thursday Throwdown

Thursday Throwdown 9/11/08

Adam Kohut, Corey Demoss, and Dane Beavers debate what the best breakfast food is.

Bacon

Bacon might not be the staple of a breakfast plate, but it’s sure as hell the best breakfast item on the menu.

It’s the best tasting, the most consistent and will never disappoint. You order bacon, you know what you’re getting. Crispy or chewy, it’s going to taste awesome.

There’s no over hard, over easy, hardboiled, sunny side up, poached or scrambled. That’s at least three too many decisions. Just give me my breakfast. I’ll take five strips of bacon. Eggs as an afterthought, pancakes if I’m really hungry — or in the mood to cook a pain in the ass meal.

Don’t worry about flipping bacon like you do pancakes and eggs — unless you cook it on a stove, I suppose, but come on, its the 21st century, man, use a microwave and taste that perfection.

There’s no bacon-shell or bacon batter. It’s grab it and go, baby. We live in a day and age of convenience. We want things when we want them and I want bacon now. Or at least in the three minutes it takes to nuke it and produce an immaculate combination of salt, grease and meat.

That’s another thing. In the battle between bacon, eggs and pancakes, the former is the only meat.

I could close the argument at this point, but I’ll continue to further grind my opponents into the ground with a single toe. Not the big one, either. The pinkie toe, the weak one. The toe that breaks when you stub it on the coffee table in the middle of the night.

For the vegetarians out there, try veggie bacon. It might not taste as good, but at least you’re not depriving yourself completely of the best food on the planet. Don’t eat pork? Turkey bacon. It’s a step down the ladder as well, but what do you want from me? I’m not here to find a solution to your problems, merely to prove the point that bacon is the one meat that’s impossible to beat.

No need to season bacon, either. With pancakes, syrup and butter are a necessity. Without them, you might as well be eating a piece of bread.

When cooking eggs, you need salt on hand, probably pepper, too. Throw in some Tabasco for good measure.

It’s all included in bacon. Every flavor you’ll ever need. All-in-one, like those jars that combine peanut butter and jelly, or a jumpsuit.

I’m in no way trying to downplay the importance of eggs and pancakes. They’re great. I eat them — gladly — but something’s just missing without a few strips of bacon on the side.

It’s like scuba diving without a tank of air. You’ll see a few fish, sure, but after a few minutes you’re going to need to come up for air. Then where will you be? Sitting on the boat, wanting more, while everyone else is still swimming around underwater, catching glimpses of whales, sharks and sunken ships.

You should have ordered bacon, moron.

Adam Kohut is the A&E editor and a professional writing senior.

Eggs

When Rocky Balboa wakes up at the butt crack of dawn to start his training in “Rocky,” he doesn’t grab a frying pan or get out the pancake batter to make bacon and pancakes.

No, he nonchalantly cracks five delicious eggs into a glass and takes it to the face in one swig.

Why would the world’s greatest fighter do this, you ask?

Because he’s a man and he knows exactly what he needs to start his day off right.

In order to train at his maximum ability, he knows he needs that extra get-up in the morning — that extra get-up only eggs can bring. How else do you think he had the energy to conquer the likes of Apollo Creed and Ivan Drago?

Yeah, he might eat bacon and pancakes every once in a while, but I guarantee there are always eggs alongside those second-rate items.

That’s because eggs are the perfect compliment to all breakfast items.

It’s always, ‘What do you want with your eggs, Timothy?” or “How do you want your eggs cooked, Samantha?”

And there are so many ways to cook your eggs: scrambled, over-easy, sunny-side up, poached, fried, an omelet.

Wait, don’t little egg enclosures called omelets house little chunks of things like ... bacon?

Argument over, bacon lovers. Eggs dominate you.

Also, what exactly are pancakes made from?

Well, according to the fictional Web site HowToMakePancakes.org, pancakes are made with flour, milk, butter and ... EGGS.

Wow, that hurts. Pancakes disqualified.

If you need any further insistence on why eggs are better than both bacon and pancakes, let me include this.

Have you ever tried to throw a piece of bacon and/or a pancake at a house?

Probably not, because eggs are far more aerodynamic and splatter-riffic. They were designed specifically for eating and throwing, whereas you can only eat bacon and pancakes. Two is clearly better than one.

I don’t think there’s really a debate on this subject.

Would you rather gain 40 lbs. from eating pancakes and bacon all the time or eat eggs, train like a man and ascend to the top of fighting lore?

I know what I’d do.

Dane Beavers is the senior online editor and a journalism senior.

Juan Herrera prepares an omelette at the Diner Wednesday morning. Herrera has been working at the Diner for over ten years. "I think I was born here," Herrera said. The Diner is located at 213 Main Street. Amy Frost/The Daily

Pancakes

Here’s some food for thought: “He who goes to bed hungry dreams of pancakes.”

I don’t know who said that, but it was the first thing that came up when I Googled “pancake quotes.”

For the sake of this argument, I’m going to translate that quote: “Pancakes are the greatest food — breakfast or otherwise — ever created.”

Pancakes are the chameleons of the breakfast food industry. You could eat some form of pancake at every meal for a week and never have the same thing twice. You can put virtually anything in pancake batter: fruit, chocolate chips, candy, nuts. You might as well just stick any sweet-tasting thing in there, it’ll probably be good.

You can also put anything on top of your flapjacks (that’s right, pancakes are so awesome they can’t even be contained by one term). Butter, syrup, cinnamon, fruit, fruit sauce, honey. It’s an orgy of deliciousness.

That doesn’t even take into account the different flavors of syrup with which you can top your griddlecake (yep, so good two terms aren’t enough). And in a way, pancakes are informative. Would you have ever heard of a boysenberry if pancakes didn’t exist?

And did you know that seven different countries recognize Pancake Day? It occurs on Shrove Tuesday, the day between Shrove Monday and Ash Wednesday. There’s even an International Pancake Day Hall of Fame in Liberal, Kan. I kid you not, look it up. And IHOP gives away free pancakes on that day.

Speaking of IHOP, is there an International House of Eggs or an International House of Bacon? No, because they would only have six dishes and would go out of business. In fact, people got so sick of eating eggs that they came up with a way of using them to make something better: pancakes.

Eggs being an ingredient in other foods doesn’t make them better. It just makes them the whore of the breakfast industry.

Pancakes are one of the only self-sufficient breakfast foods. Both eggs and bacon need something with them to make them enjoyable. But a big stack of pancakes drenched in glorious maple syrup is always amazing, even if it’s by itself.

So really, there’s no argument here. In the breakfast world, pancakes are Batman, while bacon is Robin and eggs are Alfred the butler. They might be useful and have their strengths, but they’d be nothing by themselves.

Corey DeMoss is the Sports editor and a journalism senior.