Origami Egg Sandwiches

This is a fun way to make egg sandwiches for one. It's a technique that's inspired by Anda Toast, the Indian egg toast you find in the streets of Calcutta.

I've never been to Calcutta, but if you are to believe everything you see on the internet (and why wouldn't you), anda toast made by cooking a thin omelet of eggs seasoned with onions, cilantro, and chiles in a sizzling hot skillet until the bottom is set but the top is still runny. A couple slices of soft bread are added to the top of the still-runny omelet, then the omelet is folded around the bread before being turned out onto a plate. It winds up looking halfway between an omelet and French Toast.

I've tried recreating the original dish at home, but in making it, I wondered if the technique is one that would be useful for a Western style breakfast sandwich. Despite the fact that the first time I made it I had a GoPro strapped to my head and was already three sheets to the wind after a night of karaoke, and despite having to do some powerful mental acrobatics to figure out exactly how to properly fold the egg so that it ended up in between the two halves of an English muffin, it all worked out swimmingly.

I was muffin short of a miracle.

Since then, I've made dozens of times at home and have picked up a few tricks int he process.

To start, I whip together a couple of eggs with a pinch of salt (salting your eggs before scrambling them helps them to retain more moisture and stay more tender as they cook). If I have some parsley or chives, I may mince them and add them to the mix as well. Next I fry a split English muffin and a couple slices of Canadian bacon in butter in a carbon steel skillet (non-stick works just fine for this).

For sandwiches like this, I like to split my English muffin with a knife as opposed to a fork, in order to get good contact between the muffin and the pan.

Once the muffin and meat are browned, I reheat the skillet over moderately high heat, add a knob of butter, and pour in the eggs. The eggs should sizzle the moment they hit the pan. This is not one of those French-style fancy-pants omelets with no browning. The eggs should cook pretty hard here so that you get a nicely browned, lightly crispy bottom that cooks before the top of the eggs can finish setting.

As the eggs cook, I start layering on my other ingredients, starting with a couple slices of Canadian bacon placed side by side, a couple slices of American cheese, and the split muffin, placed directly on top of the cheese. The only tricky part is flipping the whole thing over so that the muffing end up directly against the pan surface with a thin omelet draped over them like a blanket.

I find a thin metal fish spatula is the best to for the job. It allows you to sneak under the edges of the omelet with minimal disturbance (though if you're using non-stick and don't want to scrape a metal spatula along its surface, you can flip the whole thing out onto a plate then invert it back into the pan).

Finally, all it takes it a couple of folds: the edges of the omelet fold in like a business letter, then the two muffin halved folded over so that the eggs end up in between them.

What I love about this method is that the heat of the eggs guarantees that the cheese will melt, while cooking the eggs hard on one side and barely setting them on the other leaves them with plenty of texture and browning, but still tender and moist.

It's also just fun to do.