This Breakfast Sandwich 'Hack' Is Bad, Actually

I live on the west coast, which means that by the time I rise and shimmer, most of my co-workers are already hours ahead of me, and I often have a few messages waiting for me. Yesterday morning, one of them was a link to this Daily Mail article, sent to me by our deputy editor Jordan Calhoun.

The article boasted a “secret bacon and egg roll cooking trick” that would “change the way you eat them forever.” The trick? Dig out a hole in a crusty roll, lay down some bacon, crack an egg on top of the bacon, sprinkle cheese on top of the bacon, then close it up and bake it all together. Daily Mail claimed that this configuration would “stop the runny yolk from oozing out of the bread.”

“Is this actually good?,” Jordan asked. “I could see this working,” I replied, barely awake, “though if you cut it [the sandwich] in half [the yolk] still oozes out lol.” But then I had coffee, and thought about it some more, and actually read the article. Then the doubt set in.

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For starters, I’m pretty sure the only way you can stop yolk from oozing is to cook it until it’s no longer runny—it’s a matter of physics!—but the Mail seemed convinced that this was the neatest possible solution. “The simple trick will stop the yolk from oozing out all over the roll, or running down your hands while eating,” they explained. “Instead, the bread will soak up all the yolk.”

This was not my experience.

I built the sandwich as instructed. I cut a very thin slice of bread from of the top of the roll, dug a little hole in the bottom, and lined it with salty pork. (I used prosciutto because that’s what I had and because it seemed like it would do a better job keeping the raw white from seeping into the bread.) Then, I cracked an egg into the meat nest, topped it with cheese, closed it, and baked it for 25 minutes at 355℉. (The Mail article suggests a cooking temp of 190℃, but the video instructs one to go with 180℃; I went with the video.)

Credit: Claire Lower

It looked very nice, and I would have been quite happy eating it with a fork and knife (with some hot sauce), just as I would an egg-in-a-hole (because that’s basically what it is—a baked egg-in-a-hole). I usually cut my breakfast sandwiches in half, but that would have defeated the whole point of the will-the-yolk-run experiment, so I kept the sandwich whole and took a cautious bite.

It was very hot. I took another (very hot) bite, then another. It took me about five bites to get to the (also kind of hot) yolk, which squirted out of the sandwich and onto my face, which I did not love. I do not have a photo of that for you, because I don’t want to share a photo of me with literal egg on my face with the internet. The bread didn’t really have a chance to absorb the yolk, because the yolk shot out, but also because both pieces of bread were covered with either prosciutto or cheese, two fatty ingredients that keep moisture (and liquid yolk) out.

Beyond it being messy, it just wasn’t a good ratio of yolk to other sandwich ingredients. My first five bites were devoid of yolk, and I didn’t like that. The whole point of a runny yolk is that it oozes when you cut into the sandwich, allowing one to dip the sandwich in it as they eat and enjoy yolky goodness in every bite.

Credit: Claire Lower

I decided to make another one, to see if I liked it better cut in half. It was fine, I guess, but just as messy as any other egg sandwich, if not messier. Half of the yolk actually popped out from one side of the sandwich, probably due to being encased by greasy, slippery meat and cheese.

Credit: Claire Lower

Again, I could see it working quite elegantly as a fork-and-knife affair, but it’s not an improvement on the normal breakfast sandwich configuration. My advice is to embrace the inherently messy nature of the yolk. Or, if you don’t want a messy sandwich, try a scrambled egg. Scrambled eggs don’t ooze.