The best of portable breakfast bites
given to the question, “What business makes your favorite breakfast sandwich in the Capital Region?” The survey results — see more in the box — came up with the top four spots as the Paddy Wagon Food Truck, Mccarroll’s in Delmar, the Saratoga Springs deli Fat Paulie’s, and Eggy’s Place in the Albany area.
To understand how the breakfast sandwich came upstate, you need to travel back to the 1800s. Prominent food writer James Beard credited Chinese immigrants who laid railroad tracks as the developers for what would later be known as a Denver, or western, sandwich. He surmised in his writing that enjoying a sit-down breakfast was not possible while building America’s first cross-continental infrastructure project, so Chinese laborers took the concept of egg foo young, the Americanized spelling of a traditional Cantonese dish, and added the ingredients locally available to them (scraps of meat, onions, peppers) and fried them with eggs into an omelet. Served in bread, it became America’s first breakfast sandwich, and likely spread to other parts of the country when the recipe and technique were embraced by cattle ranchers and cowboys during cattle drives.
In Heather Arndt Anderson’s book, “Breakfast: A History,” she cites breakfast sandwiches as first appearing in Maud C. Cooke’s 1897 cookbook, “Breakfast, Dinner and Supper, or What to Eat and How to Prepare It.” For the recipe of “breakfast sandwich,” Cooke instructed to place chopped meat between slices of stale bread, then pour a mixture of milk, egg and salt over the sandwich to soak into the bread before frying on both sides in a buttered pan. (Similar to a croque monsieur.)
Ken Albala, professor of history at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., has written 25 books on food including titles focused on breakfast. He said that the introduction of breakfast sandwiches to the New York area likely came from the street carts outside office buildings in New York City and other Northeast cities (like Albany) in the 20th century. He said that other meat-filled items, like Cornish pasties “never caught on here. Probably at some point some lunch cart thought, ‘Let’s put an egg on this.’”
Breakfast, Albala said, was historically a meal eaten with a fork at the table, but as industrialization took hold and commuter culture developed, breakfast became an on-the-go meal. “Americans’ favorite foods are all things that you hold with your hands. People were looking for portable options, and the rise of fast food fit the need for informality, efficiency and speed,” he said, calling it the “Hot Pocket phenomenon.”
In the Capital Region, a breakfast sandwich is never far away. Bodegas, restaurants, delis and convenience stores in each corner of the region sell breakfast sandwiches all day long, but the most ubiquitous is that from Saratoga-based Stewart’s Shops. Erica Komoroske, director of public affairs for Stewart’s Shops, said that the company first started selling breakfast sandwiches in the 1980s and now sells 13,300 breakfast sandwiches (branded as an “eggwich”) a day across its 335 stores. That number is down slightly from 14,600 sold daily in 2019, due to fewer commuters during the pandemic. Komoroske said that the signature eggwich sells best, which is a hard roll with egg, sausage and American cheese, and is also the top-selling graband-go breakfast item. While other versions are also popular and available throughout the day (including various meat options, egg white version, egg wraps and English muffin and biscuit options), most breakfast sandwiches are sold before noon at Stewart’s Shops.
The thing that makes New York’s breakfast sandwiches stand out from others across the country comes down to one factor: the hard roll. “The hard roll is the item people seem to gravitate towards in the Capital Region,” said Komoroske. (Our survey showed hard rolls as being overwhelmingly preferred for bread options.) Albala, who is from New Jersey, said the hard roll — or kaiser roll — is unique to upstate New York, New York City and the immediate areas surrounding it. “You don’t find kaiser rolls outside of the New York area. They are a perfect vehicle for a sandwich,” he said.
The soft, airy interior with a thin brittle crust is well-suited for toasting on a buttered flat-top grill and soaking up meat, egg and cheese drippings. It is sturdy enough to hold with one hand yet still tender to allow for easy eating. The roll, a product of the Austrian empire, was likely brought to New York by German immigrants who settled throughout the state. The use of a hard roll is a differentiator from other sandwiches and first meal offerings that make breakfast sandwiches uniquely ours.
The concepts of efficiency and transportability of breakfast sandwiches were standardized in 1971 for the fast-food market by Herb Peterson, a California Mcdonald’s franchise owner who is credited with inventing the Egg Mcmuffin and the Teflon ring for which to cook the eggs into a perfectly round shape to fit atop an English muffin. According to the Mcdonald’s corporate website, the company sells 10 versions of a breakfast sandwich, from the Mcmuffin to the Mcgriddle, which loses the English muffin in favor of dense pancakes. Some stores also sell a sausage breakfast burrito.
In October 2015, Mcdonald’s announced it would serve breakfast all day, but in the wake of the COVID pandemic, the company suspended the practice and ended breakfast service at 10:30 a.m. The rising market power of breakfast may reverse that decision: According to Modor Intelligence, a market research firm, the global breakfast food market is projected to grow annually at a rate of 4.6 percent through 2025. Frozen breakfast sandwiches for home consumption have embraced the attention given to breakfast, and a report by Statista showed that 47.54 million Americans purchase Jimmy Dean brand breakfast sandwiches in 2020 alone. Other brands — like Morningstar and Eggo — also sell frozen breakfast sandwiches.
“I’m hard pressed to find a place that eats a sandwich for breakfast,” said Albala, and while there are other examples of eggs in bread around the world, none of them are something Americans would recognize as a sandwich. Abundant utility is hard to argue against when making the case for why breakfast sandwiches are the quintessential morning staple in the Capital Region, but local enthusiast Back said that it is the flavor and nostalgia that makes him a saveur of breakfast sandwiches.
“The flavor combination between the melty cheese and the ketchup flowing over the butter eggs and crisp a** bacon is to die for, and it will probably kill me. It’s umami on steroids.”