How to Make Bacon, Eggs & Hash Browns with One Eye Open

Saturday morning or, heck, tomorrow, there's no need to be an octopus-line cook: This recipe takes the quickest, laziest, best ways to make American breakfast foods and organizes them, quite literally—on a sheet pan—so that you end up with a full breakfast spread in 30 minutes flat, even on your groggiest morning.

Here’s how it happens: Cook bacon in the oven (this way, you won't sputter grease all over your kitchen and you'll be left with evenly crisp bacon).

Meanwhile, prep hash browns by grating potatoes and wringing out their starchy liquid. Transfer your crisp bacon from the sheet pan to a foil packet, to keep warm, then arrange the potato shreds in the thinnest layer on the pan in the bacon’s fat. With gaps around the taters for steam to escape (a trick Josh Ozersky taught us), the potatoes end up totally crisp in a fraction of the time it would take you to make sort of mushy, not really crispy hash browns. Ozersky's method skips the potato-rinsing step, and you could, too, though I do think it helps the potatoes crisp up in the oven. And, for the first time, you need something to do while the bacon's cooking.

While the hash browns are cooking, you'll make half-set eggs on the stove. By letting the egg whites set in a frying pan before finishing them in the oven (à la Jessica Koslow, reigning breakfast priestess of Los Angeles), the yolks are the right amount of runny and the whites are totally cooked through. So, yes, you've just dirtied a second pan, but you won't have to re-make your eggs (for once).

Once one side of your hash browns are crisp, you flip them and those eggs on, right next to your starch snowflakes.

If you’re like, where’s the toast? What about the pancakes? Cook (a.k.a. fry) those in the bacon fat before the potatoes and eggs, then keep them warm in a foil packet in the oven. The recipe could also easily be doubled—just use two sheet pans!

I’ve made this nearly every weekend for a month and am happy to report that it is a boon for slumpy mornings when you’re too hungry to even think about leaving the house for brunch. You can make these same foods more quickly, and I’d argue, better-tasting, at home.

The recipe is very precise and detailed so that you can operate on autopilot if necessary, but after you follow it once, you'll be repeating ad nauseam, by memory. Good morning! I mean, you're welcome.