What Does “Egg Sandwich” Mean To You?

Just last year, a year ago this month actually, I did 31 days straight of unique breakfast sandwiches every day, most of them involving eggs. It’s harder than you might think–you can change the bread, the meat, you can use cheese or brown sauce or hot sauce or any number of other accoutrements; you can fry the egg, poach it, boil it, scramble it–there are a lot of different possibilities, but to go beyond saying “OK, yesterday was bacon egg and cheese on a biscuit, today will be bacon egg and cheese on an English muffin,” to be creative about it, takes a lot of thought. I was and am proud of that post (and I probably gained 10 pounds writing it), but after a year, have I really recharged my batteries when it comes to egg sandwich ideas?

I mean, I got a start on it. I made myself an egg salad sandwich.

Then I remembered I’d done a much better egg salad sandwich in last year’s post, with Sriracha mustard and some homemade deviled ham. I needed some fresh ideas. I needed… somebody else’s ideas.

So I asked some friends of mine in the food world–restaurateurs whose establishments I frequent, other bloggers with whom I’m acquainted, food writers I admire, Dennis Lee (he’s a category by himself)–to tell me what the words “egg sandwich” brought to their minds.

Their replies were great, and I’m thrilled to be able to share them with you. Besides, I’m lazy, and that means less writing for me this month.

Jim Graziano

Chicagoans will know Jim Graziano as part of the 4th generation behind J.P. Graziano Grocery & Sub Shop, running the place with his sister DeAna and his mother Mary Ellen. Readers of this site will also recognize his shop as my favorite place to get a sandwich for lunch. With Jim’s Italian Deli background, it should come as no surprise that when he thinks of an egg sandwich, the Pepper and Egg sandwich is where his mind goes.

Pepper & Egg Sandwich hands down is what I think. Which, in turn, makes me think of Lent.

pepper and egg sandwich

My favorite is sautéed garlic and onions with diced red bell peppers, eggs scrambled, mixed in, and finished with some shredded mozzarella. Butter the inside of d’Amatos bread and let that toast a little in the pan. Load everything into the bread & top it with a good amount of Tabasco. Definitely knocking one of those down for breakfast this week! Hard to find one I like better than what I make myself. They’re usually too dry, and green peppers add no flavor. There was a tent at the Melrose Park fest when I was a kid though that used red peppers, and that’s where that idea came from.

J.P. Graziano recently closed for a bit of remodeling, but they’re back open now, and in fact were featured on the local foodie show Check, Please! days after reopening. They’ll have muffulettas on special throughout the month of February, which means I will likely be eating muffulettas throughout the month of February. They don’t sell pepper and egg sandwiches, but if they did, based on the version I made for myself using Jim’s instructions, they’d be killing it.

Titus Ruscitti

Titus Ruscitti is a Chicago-based food blogger whose dedication to tracking down out-of-the-way bits of local flavor wherever he goes makes for some epic reading. His Chicago Taco Bucket List is legendary. He writes extensively for his own blog, Smokin’ Chokin’ and Chowing With the King, and what doesn’t end up there might spill over into Thrillist, Serious Eats, or his frequent roundup posts on LTHForum. He’s also a fan of the Pepper and Egg sandwich.

In my childhood, my mom used to practice the whole no meat on Fridays during Lent thing,

Pepper and Egg “with hot” courtesy of Titus Ruscitti

and there were some instances when my dad would ask if we wanted anything from the Beef spot on a Friday. So my mom would tell him to get Pepper and Egg sandwiches for the kids. I always ate mine but not without thinking what could have been had it been an Italian Beef instead. Eventually I figured out that there were always a few pieces of beef that snuck into a Gravy Bread, and I started to order those instead until I reached my teens and had my own access to an Italian Beef on a Friday. I still order a Pepper and Egg now and then but I usually prefer it with sausage, Johnnie’s being the best example of that (Fridays only). Typically the peppers are sweet but I think it’s pretty common for Chicagoans to add hot.

And now I wish I’d put some giardiniera in the one I made!

Tony Anteliz

Tony Anteliz, whom I interviewed last year in my piece on Cemitas, is the owner of the Cemitas Puebla restaurants in Chicago, featuring the namesake sandwich. He’s an accessible, gregarious guy, usually to be found behind the counter or in the kitchen at one of his locations, and he’s been a tireless evangelist of Pueblan cuisine (and especially the sandwiches) in Chicago. I love this story about his favorite egg sandwich.

As a kid I was a picky eater, I didn’t like eggs. My mom tricked me into eating & liking

A great eye, monstrous, wreathed in bread

eggs with an egg sandwich. She called it ‘Huevo Monstro’ which means ‘egg monster’. It was a sunnyside up egg on 2 pieces of buttered toasted bread cut into triangles. The yolk looked like a cyclops eye to me as a kid. Hence the monster part. Best damn egg sandwich ever, brother. Every Thursday when I drop off my daughter at my mom’s house she still makes one for me. My 3 daughters have also come to know the ‘Huevo Monstro’.

I asked Tony if he’d ever served an egg sandwich at Cemitas Puebla, and he responded enthusiastically.

Most def! I have a couple regular customers that get a Cemita Milanesa with a sunny side up egg on it. It’s [emoji fire] [emoji fire] [emoji fire] [emoji fire]

Of course I had to have one. I’m not sure the guy cooking that day got the concept of “sunny side up” but it was still a great sandwich.

David Hammond

David Hammond is Dining and Drinking Editor for Newcity/Chicago, and a regular contributor of food-related articles for Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Wednesday Journal and Rivet Radio; he is a founding member and lead moderator of LTHForum.com, the 18,000 member Chicago culinary chat site. He’s also been known to argue with me about club sandwiches but that’s unlikely to go on his bio anytime soon.

I eat egg sandwiches in one way only: sliced hardboiled eggs, drizzled with olive oil,

Boiled egg sandwich a la Hammond

dressed with salt and pepper. Adding olive oil and salt/pepper is the way my Italian granny used to eat breakfast eggs, and now it’s the way I prefer to have them. Each sandwich takes two eggs; one is not enough coverage, three and the egg slices start slipping off one another. Fried egg sandwiches, to me, are too dry, and they always seem like an underachievement, an excuse for a really good sandwich, just the simplest protein, prepared the simplest way, slapped on bread (yawn). Egg salad is okay, I guess, but it seems sloppy, always spilling out the edges; I’d rather have egg salad on a plate, hold the bread.

Side note on eggs: over the past few weeks in Thailand, we had eggs almost daily, and every single one had the most beautiful yellow-orange yolk–must be due to the chickens’ diet of mostly bugs rather than industrial feed.

You know who else likes egg salad (and unusual yolks)?

Dennis Lee

What can one say about Dennis Lee? Named “Best Food Writer (of ‘your mama’ jokes)” by the Chicago Reader in 2015, he’s written for Serious Eats and the AV Club, but his true calling only became clear when he started his own website, the brilliant The Pizzle, late in 2014. Our paths have yet to cross in real life but one day soon I’m going to buy this man a beer. Dennis told me about a couple of his favorite egg sandwiches.

My favorite egg sandwich is a classic egg salad sandwich on white bread, hard-boiled eggs gently mixed with finely chopped onions and celery (not too much of either, mind you), and bound with Hellman’s mayo. That’s it. Growing up, my family used Miracle Whip, but once I discovered the joy of real mayonnaise in egg salad (sorry mom), I died and went to heaven.

Balut egg salad sandwich courtesy of The Pizzle

My second favorite version of an egg salad sandwich is a little extreme. I once made egg salad sandwiches out of balut, which is a partially formed chicken embryo boiled in the shell. The idea of using babies to make a sandwich is disturbing enough, but what’s even worse (better) is how genuinely delicious it is. The balut is savory with a deeply rich egg and poultry flavor, and accented with a tiny dash of fish sauce along with the usual celery and onion, you can serve this to someone and both delight and terrify them. I know, I’m a horrible person.

I have never before been so tempted to try balut. Dennis’ recipes do not often result in something so tasty-looking though.

Jeff Ruby

Jeff Ruby is a food & dining critic and editor at Chicago Magazine–where his recent Seven Deadly Sins-themed takedown of C Chicago was the talk of the Chicago food scene last summer–and the co-author of Everybody Loves Pizza: The Deep Dish on America’s Favorite Food. He’s also got terrific taste in music, over which we’ve bonded once or twice on Twitter.

I never understood the concept of egg sandwiches beyond the McMuffins of my youth, which barely qualified as egg or sandwich. Eggs were for breakfast, sandwiches lunch. And brunch was Beelzebub’s banquet served for the desperate and damned. So that was a no go.

Fannie’s Killer Fried Egg Sandwich from M Henry. Photo by Brian Riggins

But a few years ago, we did a big breakfast feature for Chicago magazine, and I kept coming across these insane egg sandwiches involving heroic ingredients like maple-glazed pork shoulder and buttery caramelized brioche French toast and eggs laid by free-range ducks that had been raised by monks and beer-massaged by geishas. The pinnacle had to be Fannie’s Killer Fried Egg Sandwich at M. Henry in Andersonville: a crispy sour boule layered with over-medium eggs, thick applewood smoked bacon, plum tomatoes, oozy Gorgonzola, and fresh thyme. It was amazing, and I finally understood. You can get your sweet and salty, your crunchy and smooth, your breakfast and lunch, in one delicious, decadent go. And forget about food until dinner.

I think I know somebody who might disagree with Jeff about Egg McMuffins.

https://twitter.com/TheFoodLab/status/683416876865732610

J. Kenji López-Alt

J. Kenji López-Alt is the Managing Culinary Director of Serious Eats and the author of the New York Times Best Selling book The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science. His name has also shown up from time to time in my posts, as I admire and appreciate his scientific approach to cookery (though I cannot say I personally have approached his level of rigor). I recently bought his book on Amazon, so I imagine his techniques will be showing up again in the near future. He’s a fairly approachable presence on Twitter, and as it happens has had egg sandwiches on his mind recently for an upcoming piece.

Kenji was nice enough to send us the following words on his ideal egg sandwich(es).

There are at least four great egg sandwiches I’d place in the running for best in the world. The first is the sausage and egg sandwich on homemade English muffins from The Model Bakery in St. Helena, California (it’s the muffins baked in clarified butter that make them). The maple sausage breakfast sandwich from 4505 Meats in San Francisco is the only egg sandwich that engages in the frippery of greens that I can get down with (the homemade sausage is that good). Any true New Yorker can tell you that the corner bodega egg sandwich made on a kaiser roll that steams to softness in its foil wrapper is the stuff a hangover’s worst nightmare is made of. But to me, the king of breakfast sandwiches – and don’t kill me for saying it – is a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit from McDonald’s.

Bacon Egg and Cheese Biscuit from McDonald’s

I can’t tell you that the biscuit is any good, nor is the spongy, reheated-from-frozen egg patty. The bacon is almost never crisp and the cheese is standard-issue ultra-melty-but-no-flavor American. In fact, take any one of the four ingredients in it and compare them to their “real” counterparts and you’ll be severely disappointed. But stick them all together and it just works. The biscuit is extra-salty and dense so that it holds up to the sandwich as you bite your way through. The egg patty has a porous texture that actually helps it absorb the melted gooey cheese and the bacon, while not meaty or crisp, adds just the right level of smoky-sweet flavor.

Don’t believe in the power of the Golden Arches? Try this little experiment: Next time you have an early morning flight, get good and drunk the night before. Get to the airport and order the sandwich (because every airport has a McDonald’s, right?). There now. Isn’t that the best thing you’ve ever tasted in your life?

Next time I’m hungover in an airport, I’ll give it a shot and let you know!

I’d like to thank Jim Graziano, Titus Ruscitti, Tony Anteliz, David Hammond, Dennis Lee, Jeff Ruby, and J. Kenji López-Alt for the generous gift of their time in helping me explore egg sandwiches in a different way this month. I hope you all got as big a kick out of their stories as I did. And if you have an egg sandwich story to tell, please put it in the comments below!