Chris Makes Breakfast Sandwiches | From the Test Kitchen | Bon Appétit

So listen up, get out there and live your life. It's like he's trying to sabotage me. I didn't think we were going to have time to make the healthiest

breakfast

sandwiches

today, but it turns out we do so much better for you and me and everyone else in this. Cooking in New York there is the phenomenon of the cellar sandwich type as the classic bacon, egg and cheese sandwich that probably saved you from countless hangovers, countless mornings of hanging greenery. I myself, you know, have a deep love and appreciation for that sandwich, but you. ask yourself the question what would it take to make you a little healthier?

It would probably go something like this, so the first thing we're going to do is make bacon with onions and interpret it as you'll be fine. It's not like trying to really make some kind of meat substitute, but there's a certain way that bacon gives depth and ground the flavor of a bacon, egg and cheese and onion sandwich. You add a little soy sauce and a little garlic powder. a little salt olive oil takes on a similar not identical look, a very similar kind of flavorful, deep, rich, full of umami quality, so normally when I cut an onion I go more or less along the long axis, if that works today I'm going to go the other way I'm going to cross the equator then I'm going to peel it and the reason I'm going to cut it this way is that what I don't want are like big chunks of stringy onion that are going to come out of this sandwich too easily, this will result in these really nice big onion petals that will flatten out and stay in place and that's kind of essential to building a good

breakfast

sandwich. it shouldn't be sliding in and out and all good so i took the top off i guess i could have done it first it might have made a little more sense no big deal i'm just going to separate the petals on this onion that I want to have kind of nice big petals, separate them into nice big rings.

The onion bits might never really be bacon, but they can take on a similar kind of really deep kind of rich umami quality to them. In this case, you know, onion. it goes in that direction itself, especially the red onion, which is very pleasantly sweet, roasts very tender, and has a creamy quality. I'm helping her on this one with some soy sauce which is also super, you know, kind of rich and flavorful, so I'm just trying to keep these rings and I like the pieces as intact as possible that way, after After grilling them, we'll be able to flatten them out on the sandwich and they'll be a little bit like a strip of bacon, so I'm putting just a tablespoon of olive oil on this to help the onion get a little soft and jammy.

A little soy sauce. This is a teaspoon of normal soy. sauce that's going to boost the umami quality with from the onion and then the garlic powder, which isn't necessarily a substitute for raw garlic, but it does add garlic flavor in a very deep and precise way, so it's a great addition to Dry rubs are a great addition to blender sauces because it's not going to have that sharp in-your-face raw garlic quality, it's going to have a little bit more of a kind of low-level umami richness so I'm also going to season a little of salt and then it's actually pretty good.

I'm going to mix them all up well and they're going to go in the oven at 350 oh I did it again. I don't know how cool that is. it is or is not thank you this is what they will become so red onion in particular because of that sugar content it becomes sweet and jammy and oily in a way that most other onions just don't tend to be kind . of dry and sad while red onion has this delicious fatness to it there's a lovely kind of deep and rich to it but it's almost smoky you know it almost tastes like it's been cured or adulterated in some way like bacon so we have like our lovely kind of onion rings here that are going to be, you know, grab our sandwich for adding a little bit of that kind of depth to it.

I'm actually going to throw them to the side on our speed rack here, so when I was talking to Andy about this sandwich, I said what do you think a healthier breakfast sandwich should have in it and he said it has to have something green in it. and I racked my brain like green green like, I mean, yeah, you can do it like a little arugula. pesto you're making arugula pesto for your breakfast sandwich you're hungover or you were up too late or you're staying over and you just want to make something tasty for yourself you know i can think of so many days in my life that i probably would have been a lot better maybe 200% better if I had something like this to get me up and moving about anyway, point is why not use it as an amazing green hot sauce that has a little bit of that in it as it's more like a vegetable herbaceous type of quality rather than just your standard red and you absolutely could use red hot sauce for this it doesn't really matter much because we're going to augment this with something they talk about herbs but a hot sauce actually has a lot of complexity that you're looking for in a kind of seasoning or ready to use dressing so I didn't want this to become a big question. you're grilling onions you're making some fluffy scrambled eggs I didn't want the sauce to be a very labor-intensive item, so I'm going to use a couple tablespoons of this delicious Cholula Green Hot Sauce.

I'm going to round it up and thin it out a little bit with a little bit of olive oil and I'm going to put some freshly chopped herbs in it and that will give us a super easy seasoning really good ok I'm going to chop some herbs you could use dill cilantro basil whatever you have to mano i'm just going to do some mix to mix here any mild herbs will be totally welcome i have our herb so to make andy happy and because it was the right thing to do i have a salsa verde it's brilliant it's spicy it's very tasty i highly recommend it so that the next step I'm going to make some soft scrambled eggs and while before I get the eggs going I couldn't just put this on a plain bagel and calling it a day wouldn't be super healthy ish I have a particular affection for the seven Sprouted Whole Grain English Muffins from Food for Life, they're a bit dry cardboard II, but you eat one and you definitely feel healthy like you honestly feel like maybe even virtuous I'm going to go ahead and toast these in the oven while we're at work on our eggs you guys just force me to make recipes that involve breaking eggs never settle it helps if you make it with a little more room temperature eggs.

I find how these are. these are pretty good I mean I mean I can do it but like I'm not doing it on camera for America you know there's two pieces of shell in there literally I don't know how someone does it it's my Achilles heel , okay you know it's my kryptonite and I have to live with it okay well I took the shell out and admitted there was shell in there. I did the right thing healthier or not I think soft scrambled eggs need butter once in a while with moving fast in the

kitchen

I want a scrambled egg sandwich I'll use olive oil let's face it it's not that good so I don't know I won't try to beat it too much but a little bit of whipping is good oh wow this is a little bit of soft butter that's ok soft scrambled eggs soft butter they're like in the same world grab this um let's look at this as kind of an eyeball and call it a tablespoon like that like even a tablespoon of butter divided between ya know between four eggs will make two

sandwiches

the flavor you'll benefit from like the richness you know you're adding to the already rich eggs is kind of key i like to put the butter nice and melty it's like a little pre toasted on the bun very tight thanks so as soon as the butter melts I'm going to drop these you definitely need salt on your eggs I don't know if you always need pepper on your eggs maybe I'm in the minority but for this you know what We already have that hot sauce in there so I'm moving this around I'm peeling getting the eggs off the cooking surface pause for a second seasoning the little salts I'm looking for like you know when he's whisking or moving something like a little movement in the pan, Aside from moving it around, it really helps distribute the eggs and redistribute them across the surface of the cooktop continuously so nothing has a chance to overcook.

I'm just looking for a nice loose game and that's about it. I'm going to split this in half and into two small portions for our muffins, okay boom, so next step basically everything is done. I just want to get this cheese. a little melted. I'm going to cut some pieces of cheese. Put together a kind of sandwich. partially melt it. You know, three four minutes, no matter how long it takes to get that cheese a little runny and then we'll finish assembling from there. it will split my egg you really don't have to worry about the egg getting overcooked at this point the cheese is going to puff up a bit so the cheese on top already feels pretty toasty to me so just don't I'm not going to like Rito's stem here I'm going to add it just until the cheese is melted and then I'm going to finish putting it together nicely so like five minutes I just want to see a little bit of alcohol that's perfect so that was all discussed , the cool sauce goes on top ok ok ok the sauce is on top so this is what I'm saying like when you slice the onion like this you get a beautiful ring that stays there it's not going to travel too much huh? did you know?

I'm saying, crunchy, jammy, chewy, unctuous, okay okay transfer it from this hot little platter you can obviously double fist this obviously even on a plate but there's a certain point to it that you'll want to drop but there is something we can take from bodegas and delis that specialize in this type of sandwich and that is to wrap it and i know it sounds crazy like why would you wrap a sandwich that you are going to eat yourself? kind of hunched over the counter, you know, on a Saturday morning at 10:30, but it keeps everything contained, okay.

I have a sheet of parchment, you know, it's like you know, 18 inches or more, fold it under. fold it up on the sides, okay, BAM, okay, and then you'll sit there and say fat how do you eat it? you weren't like looking in your well your method cellar this is our healthiest breakfast sandwich we have we have like onion bacon TM with a little soy sauce garlic powder salt olive oil yes and then scrambled egg soft a little butter because you need it and then like a mild cheddar cheese i'm giving myself oh ma'am i gotta put that down um so good good so good bright vibrant very good woman very good get out of here you I know there are certain types of sandwiches and things you , as you know, you just associate, like going out to eat, but it's actually super easy and amazing if you can do it so well, so listen up, go out and have the party of your life like there's no tomorrow just know there's always a breakfast sandwich available the next morning if you need it ok i used to do this where i like to do this kind of thing like you know and someone once made fun of me they say yeah like

chris

with all this like boom boom boom and i was like no it's like you know come on