Guest Post: The Ultimate Egg Sandwich

Brought to you by: Norris J. Dupre of Mostly Indignation. 

Every now and then a sandwich comes along that changes your life forever. To my surprise, this happened for me shortly after I began dating my husband. He created one of the most delicious, complex, and decadent sandwiches I have ever eaten: Two eggs, two slices of toast, cheese, hash browns, Worcestershire sauce, and brown sugar bacon.  See how it’s made below, according to Norris’s specific instructions, and dazzle yourself and your loved ones with the sheer absolute perfection of this culinary delight. 

Alrighty, here we go. I will show pics, then explain what you're seeing. The total prep time for this usually runs between 15 and 20 minutes. 

These are our ingredients. I like to use a fancy multi-grain bread. Usually 8- or 12- grain. I call it "pretentious" bread, because it is a lot more fancy to me than your standard sandwich-grade wheat bread. But! It's very useful for the purposes of making these sandwiches because it is more dense and durable, two attributes that come in handy later on. It's also delicious. Unfortunately, we only had oatnut bread the day we made these, but it worked okay too. I like to use low sodium bacon, because I feel that American diets are too high in sodium anyway, and to be honest this sammich isn't going to be the most healthy breakfast item, so anywhere we can trim it down is great. I use dark brown sugar because it has a bit more of a rich flavor than light brown. I always believe that when using brown sugar, you should totally go for it. There's also American cheese, eggs, Worchestershire sauce, pepper, and hash browns. I like to use loose hash browns that come frozen. I'll explain why later on. Tools needed: nonstick skillet, spatula that can flip eggs well, something to turn bacon with, plates, lots of napkins.

Begin by toasting the bread. You can make it as dark or as light as you'd like, but I really recommend using toast, and not just bread. Toast is much more structurally stable. After it pops out of the toaster, place the toast on a plate and put a slice of cheese on top. I'm making two sandwiches in these pics.

Here I have added bacon to a nonstick skillet, turned the burner on to just below medium heat, and I'm adding some dark brown sugar to the bacon. I was raised to cut bacon strips in half to make them easier to manage while cooking, so what you see here are really only 4 full-size strips of bacon. I will typically use 3 or 4 half-strips per sandwich.

Now I am adding a bit of pepper. Adding the pepper before things take off allows the flavor to get out and mingle with the bacon. Or something. Whatever, i just like adding pepper at this point, it looks nice. Cook the bacon as slowly as you can tolerate, turning often. The sugar will begin to burn if you don't keep a close eye on it, and that will give the whole thing a ...burned sugar taste. I also don't like my bacon super crispy, so I will pull them out when it's at the point where the bacon is nice and chewy, with no squishy bits left. Sort of like this:

Now pull the bacon out of the skillet, give each piece a little shake to get rid of some of the grease, and lay it on the cheese sitting on the toast. The cheese is there to keep bacon grease from making the toast soggy.

I took a little too long getting the last bits of bacon out, and you can see some of the pieces got kind of dark. Not yet burned, but I cut it close. Remove the skillet from the heat and drain off all of the grease you can without losing all the little bits of caramelized sugar, bacon bits, and pepper in the pan.

Put the skillet back on the burner, leave it on right around medium heat, and throw in 1 tablespoon of butter (or up to two for two sandwiches) and melt it.

 Using a spatula you can gather up all the debris in the pan into the melted butter. If desired, heat the melted butter until it browns, keeping it moving constantly with the spatula. Smells good.

Carefully crack the eggs into the skillet, one or two eggs per sandwich. Make sure not to break the yolks!

Cook them "over medium" (cook until whites start to solidify on one side, then flip and cook just long enough to solidify the rest of the whites and slightly thicken the yolk), and try to keep the whites from running together. you'll need to flip the eggs individually and remove them one at a time, and letting them all turn into one blob makes this tough. Don't be afraid to err or the runny side when frying up these eggs. If you undercook them a bit, they're just kind of runny. But if you overcook them even a little, it really takes away from the final product. Mine have a bit of a brown color to them because I browned the butter first. You can see bits of the bacon debris on there too.

Remove the eggs from the skillet as soon as each one is done. Be quick! Be attentive! Place the eggs over the bacon as pictured.

Top the eggs with one more slice of cheese. You don't have to use another slice of cheese... but it's helpful to hold things together if you do. And delicious. Now time for the hash browns.

Without cleaning out anything from the egg phase, turn the burner up to high and throw a handful or two of frozen hash browns into the skillet. When trying to decide how much you want, consider that they're going to be piled on top of the already thick stack we have, so if you think you're up to the task of cramming a 3 inch sammich into your mouth, you can really go for it with the hash browns. Stir constantly at first, using the hash browns to clean up the butter and any debris still in the pan from previous phases. once they've thawed and begun to simmer, you can press the hash browns into patties and they'll cook as a big mass, or just leave them loose. Doesn't really matter.

Here I'm adding the hash browns to the top of the heap. I kept mine loose. 

Another shot of the hash browns, once piled on.

Dash some Worchestershire sauce onto the hash browns. They'll soak up most of it, which is nice.

...Then put the other piece of bread on top. Now comes the fun part. Using your hand or a spatula, apply firm downward pressure on the sandwich. The goal here is threefold: squish the layers down to get some air out, make the sammich a little thinner, and thus easier to eat, and most importantly, pop the yolks so they run as a sauce. A delicious, tasty egg sauce.

 Oh yeah, that's what I'm talkin about. Try to avoid pushing so hard a bunch of yolk comes out. But if you do, you can always just dip the sandwich into it between bites.

One awesome secondary effect to cooking the meal this way: the pan winds up almost completely clean when you're done. I wipe the surface with a paper towel and call it good. One less thing to do. Now eat your sammich! You're welcome!