In between the sky is falling posts and cat videos, my Instagram feed quickly seemed to default to offering me all sorts of variations on what people refer to as breakfast sandwiches. Something that you can prep a bunch of for the week and quickly zap in the microwave on the way out the door or at the office.
Since I've never been a big breakfast eater except on Sundays when we treat it as more like a brunch, I never really saw the point. But the same premise definitely applies to a fast lunch fix, and I find I'm still in need of those, so I decided to test drive some of the more promising recipes out there from Instagram-land and beyond.
Freezer egg sandwiches
From Better Homes & Gardens, January 2020 issue
Ingredients
8 eggs, beaten
⅓ cup milk
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
1 tablespoon chopped fresh chives
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon ground pepper
6 English muffins, toasted
6 slices cooked bacon
6 slices Cheddar cheese
Fresh spinach leaves, optional
Method
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a 13- by 9-inch pan with tin foil. Spray with cooking spray. Combine eggs, milk, herbs, mustard and salt and pepper in a medium bowl. Pour into prepared pan and bake until set, 8 to 12 minutes. Slice into six pieces, then each piece in half. Stack two slices on one half of an English muffin, then top each with a slice of bacon and a slice of cheese. (If using spinach, you can tuck that in on top of the cheese before topping with remaining muffin half once you're ready to reheat them.) Bake until cheese melts.
To assemble ahead and reheat, wrap prepared sandwiches in plastic wrap after assembling them and before melting the cheese. Ostensibly you can freeze them, then remove the plastic wrap and reheat them in a paper towel in the microwave for a minute or two.
Rating: Tasty. The herbs and mustard give the eggs some character. It's a bit like bacon cheeseburger topping meets egg sandwich. As for their instructions about reheating, well, I'm not a microwave fan in this case because of what it does to bread products, so I opt for reheating in a 350-degree oven until the cheese melts and sandwich is warmed through. I couldn't bring myself to try it from a frozen state, but I'm not imagining that being the work of a moment. It still counts as tasty fast food, at any rate.
Tomato, feta egg sandwiches
This is kind of like a bit of a caprese version of an egg sandwich, or at least one that incorporates flavors of peak summer with pesto and tomatoes. Adapted from the Instagram post of ellena_fit; go there if you want a video how-to. She cut her frittata into 4 pieces that were a bit deeper to make 4 sandwiches, but given my pan dimensions (8-by-10) it made sense to cut them into 6 because otherwise it would have hung over the edge quite a bit.
Ingredients
1 pint cherry tomatoes
1 teaspoon olive oil
8 eggs
A generous ½ cup of cottage cheese
2 tablespoons torn fresh basil leaves or 1 tablespoon oregano leaves
½ salt, plus more for sprinkling
½ cup crumbled feta
6 English muffins, split and toasted
6 slices of mozzarella
Pesto for spreading
Method
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place tomatoes in a mid-size baking dish. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with some salt. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until smooshable. Remove from oven. I chose to smoosh a few of the tomatoes and leave the rest whole.
Combine eggs, cottage cheese, herbs, ½ salt and a generous grind of pepper. Pour over tomatoes in pan. Sprinkle top with feta. Bake for 20 minutes until set. Let cool slightly.
Cut egg bake into 6 pieces. Spread toasted English muffins with pesto. Top muffin bottoms with a square of egg bake, a slice of mozzarella and the English muffin tops. Bake at 350 until cheese is melted and sandwich is heated through.
I opted to store the egg bake separately after serving us sandwiches for lunch because I was concerned that the amount of liquid in the pesto and tomatoes might result in a somewhat soggy sandwich if stored assembled, but I suppose that depends on the nature of your pesto.
Rating: The tomatoes and feta help bring more to the egg party, and pesto pairs nicely with the tomatoes. This sandwich had surprisingly good structural integrity, which can be an issue with this type of sandwich. With prebaked, precut egg bake squares it's no more trouble to make than any sandwich for lunch and it's another way to get a decent hot sandwich into the rotation on a cold day along with the soup du jour or semaine.
Bacon, egg and cheese bagels
Also from ellena_fit on Instagram.
Ingredients
4 bagels (the everything bagels worked well here)
8 eggs
½ cup cottage cheese
2 tablespoons chopped fresh chives
4 slices of cooked bacon, chopped
½ salt
4 slices smoked gouda or cheddar cheese
Sriracha mayo for spreading, or see Cane's dipping sauce recipe below
Method
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8-by-8 pan. Combine eggs, cottage cheese, chives, salt and a generous sprinkle of pepper in a bowl. Stir in bacon. Pour into prepared pan. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes. Cool slightly. Cut into 4 squares. Spread bagels with mayo or dip. Top each with a quarter of the egg bake and a slice of cheese. Return to oven and cook about 5 minutes until cheese melts.
Rating: This was my favorite one so far. The everything bagels really brought a little something to the party, as did that dip. (Oh, that dip. It should probably be illegal.) The bacon comes through and the smoked gouda is a nice touch.
Cane's sauce
From Diane Morrisey's Instagram post, her version of a dipping sauce from the Raising Cane restaurant. The flavor deepens a bit if you refrigerate it for a time instead of trying to use it right away. She paired hers with homemade fish sticks, which seems like another really yummy usage, and she includes a recipe at that link.1 cup mayonnaise
¼ cup ketchup
½ teaspoon cayenne powder
½ teaspoon garlic powder
½ teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon paprika
½ teaspoon smoked paprika
2 teaspoons white vinegar
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
Combine all sauce ingredients in a bowl and mix well. Definitely a little kick to it, but not like get-me-water hot or anything. The sauce is a definite keeper.
Did I need to try yet another version? Possibly not, but I did it anyway:
Spicy maple breakfast sandwiches
Adapted from "good mood food” from Kale Me Maybe’s Carina Wolff. This one drew my interest because of the homemade sausage and I liked the idea of cutting out circles of egg bake to match the English muffin size. More on that later.
Ingredients
2 tablespoon olive oil, divided
2 pounds ground pork
⅓ cup maple syrup
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon salt, divided
1 tablespoon Calabrian chili
10 eggs
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 small onion, diced
⅓ cup milk
2 cups baby spinach leaves
10 English muffins, toasted
10 slices cheese of choice, I found pepper jack works well here
Method
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a 9-by-13 pan with parchment paper.
Heat olive oil in a large nonstick skillet. Combine pork, maple syrup, garlic powder, ¼ salt and Calabrian chili in a bowl. Form into 10 patties. Cook in oil until cooked through, flipping half way through. Remove from pan and set aside on paper towels.
If needed, add additional 1 tablespoon olive oil to the skillet; depending on the fat content of your meat you might have plenty in the pan. Cook onion and bell pepper and until softened. Remove from heat and cool slightly. Combine eggs, milk and remaining salt in a bowl. Stir in sauteed vegetables and spinach. Pour into pan and bake 20-25 minutes or until set.
Cut egg bake into 10 pieces. Place egg bake on an English muffin. Top with a sausage and a slice of cheese and English muffin top. Bake until cheese melts. Alternatively, you can assemble them and then either bake or microwave them later. I did resort to the microwave once with these, because, well, I needed to clean my oven after some of the egg bake fell off a sandwich onto the oven floor. A minute on high wrapped in a paper towel will heat them through and melt the cheese, providing you don't mind rubbery cheese.
Rating: The sausages definitely bring a lot to the party and have some merit on their own. That said, if you want to simplify the prep, if you've got a good breakfast sausage brand you like, you could cook that up instead. The frittata portion is fine, and adding the spinach to the bake itself is a good call, but it's really that sausage patty doing the work. The original recipe called for ground turkey, but I wound up with pork on hand instead, so it's possible that affected the patty size. As it was, those 10 patties were pretty much small breakfast sausage size, so I didn't see the point of having equally small rounds of egg bake when the muffins were significantly bigger diameter, so I skipped that bit. I tried this once following the egg bake instructions and wound up with nearly double the amount of egg bake to sausage ratio, so I took another whack at it to rationalize for my use case.
Takeaways
So am I enamored with the make-ahead breakfast sandwich genre? Well, not entirely. The part where I had some prepped sandwich portions to assemble quickly certainly had merit. After trying the microwave approach I definitely did not appreciate what it does to cheese, so I prefer the oven, but I get that if you were transporting them to an office setting they're better than nothing.
The key: Something that makes them tasty, and generally that something is going to come in the form of meat. The one vegetarian option I tried compensated by bringing in more flavor to the egg bake portion, which helped, but the meat was definitely doing the heavy flavor lifting in these sandwiches. Everything-seasoned bagels are also a plus, and there's no reason to settle for bland cheese.
That said, as much as I adore advance meal prep as a practice, it can't really hold a candle to my preferred breakfast sandwich of softly scrambled eggs piled on a brioche bun, topped with a slice of cooked bacon and a slice of smoked gouda cheese melted in the oven. Because good things often do reward spending just a bit more time, when you have it.
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