Breakfast Sandwich Porn: Meatless and Marvelous

No meat? No problem!
Photo Credit: TH

Breakfast sandwiches more often than not follow a simple paradigm: meat, egg, cheese. Whether it be bacon, sausage, ham, or for the local Southeast Pennsylvania/New Jersey crowd, scrapple or pork roll, the meat is almost as essential on the bun or roll or bread as the egg is. A breakfast sandwich almost stands antithetical to the ideal that your first meal of the day should be carbs, carbs, and more carbs. The bread is the only conveyance of complex carbohydrate. Honestly, it's a blueprint for an ideal meal, and I'm hardly an advocate for a keto or Atkins diet.

However, how much protein is overkill? As a breakfast sandwich enthusiast, I'm not one to say that there's such a thing as too much protein. However, I do think there's room to experiment with egg and to some extent cheese as the proteins. However, one has to put on a different thinking cap to find out what purpose most breakfast meats serve. The egg is soft. The cheese is gooey. The bread, when it's good, provides a firm crunch, whether it be through toasting or through crustiness. The meat oftentimes brings a good chewy texture to the game. The exception is crispy bacon, but honestly, there are a lot of people, myself included, who prefer a chewier, more pliable bacon. You need something to replicate that texture.

So what I set out to do was create a breakfast sandwich where I could get all the textures I wanted without having to have meat. The solution was what I made this past weekend. The egg was bog standard for any breakfast sandwich I've ever made: fried, seasoned, yolk broken. The meaty chewiness I decided to replicate in two areas. One was with the cheese. Most cheeses melt into something viscous or elastic, sometimes both. Halloumi cheese, a Cypriot product meant for grilling, remains intact upon cooking, making it an ideal meat substitute. The second is through more fungal means. Shiitake mushrooms pack so much umami in a single bite; they're among the most flavorful mushrooms you can get on their own. They also retain a chew like most of their mushroom brethren. I sauteed my shiitakes in butter and seasoned with salt and garlic powder to really bring out the flavors. Not having something like American cheese on the sandwich or substituting it by cooking the eggs over easy or sunny side-up didn't make too much of a difference, although when I make this sandwich again, I might just leave the yolk whole and runny for reasons of SCIENCE.

I kicked around the idea of putting the sandwich on pita bread, but I decided against it for two reasons. One, placing the ingredients in the bread felt like it would require too much work and luck to get right, no matter if I cut the bread open or used the whole pita as some sort of ersatz tortilla. Two, I wanted the bread to have a hard counter-texture to go with all the soft and flexible ingredients inside the sandwich. My wife and I bought a loaf of everything-seasoning Tuscan pane at Trader Joe's. Lightly toasting it gave it a hearty and crunchy texture that my sandwich needed. Of course, no TH breakfast sandwich is complete without some kind of hot sauce. Because this sandwich had a Mediterranean flair, I chose zhoug, the Yemeni herb-and-garlic hot sauce. The herbaceous brightness along with the subtle but present heat really tied everything together.

Photo Credit: TH

I've made a ton of breakfast sandwiches over the years to varying degrees. I am hard on myself for good reason, because the food you make is and expression of yourself and because, well, I'm the one eating most of the food I make. This time, I think I nailed it, both with flavors and execution. The bread held up even with all the moist ingredients inside, and the innards worked together in beautiful harmony. Certainly, the idea of a breakfast sandwich without meat isn't a new one, but meat always feels like the default companion. There are other options available that will make a delightful sandwich to start your day that don't involve the bog standard things like avocado or tomato.