Taiwanese Breakfast Sandwich

If you, like me, are interested in various kinds of food from around the world, you might find yourself one day Googling “breakfast in Taiwan.” You might read about the delights of Taiwanese pancakes, or stuffed flatbreads, or twisted sticks of fried dough, or the warm salty soy milk they’re washed down with. You could dive deeper and read about post-WWII United States selling its wheat surplus to the Republic of China, leading to the adoption of more northern Chinese cuisine like Shaobing and Mantou. Republic of China? you ask yourself. Digging deeper, you learn that since 1949 has the ROC has meant Taiwan, with mainland China ruled by the People’s Republic of China or PRC, who also consider Taiwan part of their territory. You might then rub your eyes, look around, and remind yourself that you were reading about Taiwanese cuisine, not 20th Century Asian history.

What you might not run across upon a casual search is any mention of today’s subject, the Taiwanese breakfast sandwich. I first came across it in the Thrillist.com Summer of Sandwiches article Around the World in 80 Sandwiches, which showcased a number of new-to-me sandwiches that have since been added to our List. Thrillist called it “a triple-decker feat of epic proportions,” which is certainly a grandiose description. In the same article they also called me “an enterprising investigative sandwich blogger” so they may be given to exaggeration.

As I researched it, I began to wonder if it was in fact real, and if so whether it was in fact a prominent part of life in Taiwan. Yet there are a number of articles that describe it, and other articles that simply say that Western-style sandwiches are a common breakfast choice. It is prosaic enough, and bears little enough variation in the descriptions I’ve read, that it may simply not inspire many grand paeans to its glories. So I choose to believe this to be a legitimate phenomenon, at least until I travel to Taiwan and check for myself. But if any Taiwanese Tribunal readers out there would like to describe it further, please reach out!

The sandwich is described as a triple-decker, and despite some confusion around the term that I experienced during my club sandwich research some years ago, this sandwich earns the term, with 4 slices of bread enclosing three separate layers–a meat layer, usually containing ham, though pork floss is sometimes used instead of or in addition to the ham; a vegetable layer containing sliced or shredded cucumber; and a middle layer between the two holding a yolky fried egg.

The sandwich bread used in Taiwan, like sandwich bread in other parts of Asia, is a milk bread made with a Tangzhong or water roux. This technique involves cooking a portion of flour to be used in the bread with some water or milk, which gelatinizes the starches in that portion of flour, improving the overall stability and shelf life of the bread, not to mention its texture. Milk breads are both soft and sturdy–they are not squishy like the breads on American grocery store shelves, but fluffy and springy, maintaining their shape well even after vigorous prodding

I acquired a loaf of Japanese Shokupan, a type of milk bread similar to what is used in Taiwan, from the bakery Pastry House Hippo embedded in Mitsuwa Marketplace. Milk bread uses often call for thicker slices of bread, but for a triple-decker, regular or even slightly-thinner-than-normal slices will be better.

The sandwich seems generally to be served in the manner of a tea sandwich–crusts removed, arranged in thin layers, and sliced into triangles, though not necessarily the bite-sized morsels that adorn the typical tea tray. I suppose a sandwich that uses 4 slices of bread cannot be rendered dainty, no matter how small it is cut.

The sandwich begins with the bread, crusts removed, and spread with a thin layer of the sweet, eggy mayonnaise preferred by folks in Taiwan. I riffed on this recipe for the mayonnaise, using yolks only and cutting down on the sugar and oil. It was still plenty sweet.

The next layer adds another swipe of sweet mayonnaise and a fried egg, over medium, so the yolk is soft and runny but not quite gushing.

Then another layer of bread and a layer of shredded cucumber.

A final slice of bread to finish the sandwich results in a ziggurat of bread, a few sandwich fillings peeking out from between the tiers of pillowy Shokupan but… it doesn’t look like much.

That is, until it is sliced into triangles. Like many other sandwiches before it, the Taiwanese breakfast sandwich showcases its fillings best in the triangular-sliced arrangement, though unlike the British Rail sandwich, I did not deliberately stack those fillings in the middle to make it look better than it is.

It’s a lot of sandwich any way you slice it though–4 layers of bread is a lot, and with three layers of fillings… well I haven’t worked out the exact exchange rate but I’d say one Taiwanese breakfast sandwich is worth slightly more than 2 single-decker sandwiches, calorically speaking. There is quite a lot of bread to get through when eating one of these, but the sandwich compresses easily to be bit into. Half of this was an adequate breakfast, though I did go looking for the other half by 11am or so.

The strata of flavors present themselves distinctly–the salty ham, the savory egg, the crisp freshness of the cucumber, all surrounded by the pleasant and undemanding sweetness of the Taiwanese mayonnaise. I thought I might need to drain the cucumber, given the high water content, but the Shokupan was more than sturdy enough to handle this thin layer. It may seem like a lot of bread, but it is good bread, and with 4 slices to 3 fillings, the ratio is more reasonable than a sandwich with 2 slices of bread and a single filling.

I tried it again, this time with pork floss instead of ham.

Again, it didn’t look like much before the cut, but I knew that I had added a substantial layer of pork floss, with plenty of sweet eggy mayonnaise to help glue it in place, and a thicker layer of shredded cucumber than before.

The pork floss was an even better match for this sandwich’s flavors than the ham had been, its sweet/salty mix complementing the mayonnaise and egg, its cottony texture disappearing into the expanse of pillowy milk bread. One of the recipe sites I read also suggested chicken katsu or a hamburger patty as a potential filling. That got my mind working–what about char siu? Better yet, the braised pork belly used in Taiwanese gua bao?

I will have to leave that for another day though–too many sandwiches, not enough time. What else do you think would be a good filling for this Taiwanese breakfast sandwich? The possibilities seem unlimited!