Beyond the Egg McMuffin

Start your day off right with these tasty breakfast sandwiches at home Israeli salad sandwich

When anthropologists of the future look back at the last half of the 20th century, they may give credit to McDonald’s for one thing above all else: inventing the breakfast sandwich.

Searching for a way to get customers through the doors in the morning hours, someone at the fast-food giant came up with the perfect solution. They took an English muffin, placed a muffinshaped egg on top of it along with a slice of Canadian bacon and American cheese, and in a stroke of marketing genius called it an “Egg McMuffin.”

And thus the breakfast sandwich became a uniquely American tradition. But you don’t have to go through the drive-thru to get one. They are easy to make at home, and relatively fast. The variations are endless; you are limited only by your imagination.

Perhaps the most familiar is the Sunday morning standby, bagels and lox. It’s a straightforward bagel-and-lox sandwich, with a twist: I added a scrambled egg.

Think of it as an Egg McLox bagel sandwich.

There is a trick to making it, though it is easy to master. Ordinary scrambled eggs would be too lumpy; when you pressed down on the top, they would squeeze out of the sides. The trick, then, is to make the egg flat.

It’s simple to do. Pour a beaten egg into a well-buttered, mediumhot skillet. Don’t let the egg spread too far. Cook without touching it until nearly all of the liquid on top is done. Use a spatula to fold the sides over toward the middle, and immediately place this flat egg on your sandwich.

My next breakfast sandwich is an even simpler twist on an equally familiar idea: avocado toast. The twist? Bacon. Remember how, a few years ago, everyone started saying that bacon makes everything better? Bacon really does make avocado toast taste better.

Bacon also plays a key role in my next variation, a breakfast burrito. This southwestern classic is more than just bacon and eggs (or sausage and eggs) in a tortilla.

First of all, you need beans. If you don’t have beans, it just isn’t a breakfast burrito. And you also need potatoes. Potatoes do more than merely add heft and filler to the burrito; they add a satisfying depth to the flavor, an underlying foundation on which the other ingredients can be built.

Another option, an Israeli salad sandwich, is vegetarian. The heart of it is an Israeli salad — chopped tomato, cucumber, red bell pepper and scallion, tossed with olive oil and lemon juice.

This time, I added two twists. One is a chopped hard-boiled egg, to make it more breakfasty, and the other is hummus smeared on the inside of the pita before it is filled with the salad.

It was bright-tasting and remarkably refreshing.

Thursday, July 9, 2020