Better-Than-McDonald's Breakfast Sandwiches (And More Work, Too!) | Kenji's Cooking Show

Quick! Place the following four things in chronological order

• The founding of Nintendo

• The invention of the modern breakfast sandwich

• The discovery of Pluto

• The Michael Jackson album Thriller

Would it surprise you to find out that the breakfast sandwich, invented in 1972, is the second most recent of these four things?

OK, this is not quite true. The idea of a sandwich consisting of eggs and meat on a soft roll dates back as far as the 19th century, but the modern form—a stack of eggs, meat, and melted cheese on an English muffin or biscuit—didn’t gain popularity until McDonald’s introduced the Egg McMuffin in 1971. By 1981, breakfast accounted for 18% of the company’s sales according to this November, 1981 issue of TIME.

It’s easy to see why. Breakfast sandwiches are more than just a convenient format to combine the various items on a breakfast plate. Ideally, the ingredients work with each other to form a cohesive whole better than the sum of its parts.

Ideally.

While I am firm believer that it’s hard to beat a fast food breakfast sandwich when time and money are a concern, given a few basic ingredients and a spare 15 to 20 minutes, you can easily improve on the standard McMuffin experience. I explained all of this in a lot more detail on Serious Eats several years ago, and you can read about it here. But for a summary, here you go:

The Classic Egg McMuffin

A basic McMuffin consists of the following ingredients, in this order, from top to bottom:

1) An English muffin top

2) A slice of Canadian bacon (I.E. cured pork loin), heated but un-browned

3) An egg, steam-fried in a ring mold

4) A slice of American cheese

5) An English muffin bottom

Where we can Improve it

The places we can make improvements are pretty obvious.

First, let’s start by browning that Canadian bacon in a skillet. And while we’re at it, let’s swap it for some regular American style (AKA streaky) bacon so that we have a bit of crunch and some rendered bacon fat to work with. I like to keep my bacon flat by using a Chef's Press, which weighs the bacon down but allows steam to escape for better rendering.

What are we going to do with that bacon fat? Why, toast our English muffin halves, of course. While normally I’d fork-split an English muffin to maximize the cragginess of the nooks and crannies, when making sandwiches, it’s better to split them with a knife so that you have a flat surface to make maximum contact with the pan as you toast it in rendered bacon fat.

For the round egg, McDonald’s uses real eggs cracked on-site into round non-stick molds and steamed until cooked hard. At home, I use the lid of a wide-mouth mason jar (like these ones) to cook my eggs. First I brush them with rendered bacon fat, then I place them in the skillet with their tops at the bottom, tip a cracked egg into each, puncture the yolks with a fork (I don’t like runny yolk gushing out of my breakfast sandwich when I bite into it), then add some water to the skillet and cover it with a lid to cook the eggs until barely set and still a little jammy.

For some reason, McDonald’s places their cheese slice on the bottom of the stack, where it remains lukewarm and completely un-melted. I prefer to stack it in the middle so that the heat from the eggs melts it and and acts as a sort of structural glue to keep the crispy bits of bacon in-place as you eat. To ensure an even better melt, I like to wrap my sandwiches in parchment or foil then place them back in the skillet for a few moments. The sandwich steams in its package and achieves that Cosmic Oneness that every great sandwich should have.

Is the finished sandwich cheaper or more convenient than an Egg McMuffin? It sure ain’t.

But is it tastier? You bet.

(By the way, not for muffin, but Thriller came out in 1982, McDonald’s invented the breakfast sandwich as we know it in 1971, Pluto was discovered in 1930, and the Nintendo corporation was founded in 1889.)