Bacon, Egg, and Cheese Sandwich

Whether you get yours at a deli, from a coffee shop, or just make it at home, the bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich checks all the boxes: Protein, fat, carbs. Salty, rich, gooey, crispy. And above all, a good BEC is deeply satisfying—a welcome cure for everything from a hangover to heartbreak.    

Do you need a recipe for a breakfast sandwich? Maybe not. But it might behoove you to consider some careful approaches to build a better bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich which will improve your BEC game.

The Making of an Icon: The Key Components for a Great BEC

Everything about the experience of eating a BEC should be easy: Easy to understand, easy to eat, and fairly easy to make. As a breakfast item, it should ease you into and power your day—a sure, dependable experience.

I’m not here to reinvent the wheel. A classic demands simplicity. No blatant gimmicks, no sous vide, no baked egg, no artisanal sourdough, no dry-aged, house-cured pork belly confit. The ingredients should be accessible to all, because the BEC is for everyone.

The key to a great bacon egg and cheese, therefore, lies in its precise execution. In my opinion, the ideal BEC has the following basic features:

• Fully rendered, crispy strips of bacon
• A griddled, bodega-style egg
• Melty cheese (but not too much)
• A griddled roll

Its layers should exist in balance. Not too much bun, not too little bacon, not a mountain of eggs so thick you can barely manage to get your teeth around the thing. You should be able to taste each component with every bite. More simply put, the sandwich should eat well. To ensure this, every component should be more or less the same size and shape. The fillings should neither overwhelm the bread nor be overwhelmed by it, which requires scaling them to each other, because who wants all bun, no filling? Or too much filling, and no bun? Again, balance and precision. 

Now let’s go deeper.

The Bacon

Bacon plays multiple roles in this sandwich. It’s crispy, it’s salty, it’s savory, and it imparts richness. It’s a major player and we want to make sure it's in every bite. To guarantee this I employ a bacon weave, which offers maximum coverage and stability in the sandwich. As Kenji notes, a weave won’t fall apart with each bite, or fall out of the sides as you’re eating. Plus, its square shape ensures that you get some bacon with every bite. And best of all, it’s the most efficient way (i.e. the best excuse) to cram six slices of bacon in this bad boy. 

The bacon weave is assembled and  baked on a sheet tray. Baking is an efficient method for rendering fat evenly and crisping the bacon at a uniform rate.

Finally, where does the bacon actually go? I tried top, middle, and bottom positions relative to the egg and cheese. Keeping the bacon at the bottom produced far and away the best eating experience. Think about it: As your incisors pierce the top bun, they traverse through the pillowy egg, the gooey cheese, and finally hit a bit of crisp and crunch in a sturdy bacon layer before meeting your bottom teeth. That progression of textures is logical, and at the end of the day, it’s just a satisfying experience.

The Egg

No doubt, there are multiple avenues for egg cookery here. You could go fried, scrambled, or even baked. But here I stick with a tried-and-true classic: The NYC bodega-style egg.Why? It’s fairly approachable, and it gives the opportunity to fold the egg mixture into a square shape as it's cooking (the same dimensions as the bacon layer). 

This style of egg is born of short-order bodega cooks making these sandwiches for speed, cracking the whole eggs directly onto the griddle, piercing the yolk and doing an only partial scramble so that yolk and whites are semi-distributed but not well mixed. The result is a thinner sheet of egg instead of a taller pile of scrambled curds, which allows for a firmer texture of separately cooked whites and yolks so the egg holds together when you eat instead of squishing out the sides like scrambled eggs tend to.  

Don’t be tempted to add cream, or milk, or water to the eggs when whisking. While adding a splash of dairy to whisked eggs is a great technique to achieve fluffy, cohesive, and tender scrambled eggs, we actually want to avoid this texture with this bodega-style egg pocket. 

The key to this style of egg is to keep the egg whites and egg yolks relatively streaky—not fully emulsified—which produces an egg with varying textures. There’s also really no need to add any salt to the eggs. The folded-in cheese (more on that below) and bacon are salty enough, but feel free to satiate your salt lust and season away.

The key to success with these eggs is mostly timing and technique. I found that leaving the eggs about 80 percent cooked before folding gave enough leeway for carryover cooking—a perfect opportunity to introduce the cheese.        

The Cheese

Get outta here with your fancy gouda. American cheese in a BEC is all but a foregone conclusion. And I don’t even think that’s a hot take. You see, despite its reputation for being cheap, lowbrow, or decidedly not “cheesy” in flavor, American cheese’s ability to melt, stay gooey, and stay emulsified is unmatched (we can thank melting salts like sodium citrate for that), so it’s ideal for sandwiches and burgers served hot. Incidentally, it also comes in square slices, which is ideal for this application.

Here we can use that perfect squareness of the cheese slice to our advantage. By placing one slice in the center of the eggs, it’s easy to fold the edges of the egg into a neat square, using the cheese as an exact guide. There’s no guessing, but also no measuring involved. The eggs perfectly envelop the cheese, creating a square packet, and the stored heat from the eggs serves to melt the cheese.

Cheese inside the egg is great. But for added gooey factor and decadence, I top this egg-cheese packet with a second melty slice, which results in a nice cross section of egg-cheese-egg-cheese.

The Bread

I tested 10 different bread products for this BEC. I immediately ruled out breads like brioche and english muffins. Brioche was too rich and delicate to hold up to the interior, while the english muffins were too dense. But more importantly, these round roll-type breads didn’t quite fit all the fillings. For instance, English muffins were far too small, while the brioche didn’t fit the square shape of the eggs and bacon, so you encountered pockets of just bread as you ate. I saw similar results with large hamburger buns and potato rolls.

Square, sliced breads like pain de mie or Japanese milk bread were promising, but again, I found these options too delicate, getting lost in the mix of layers. Plus, the fillings would occasionally fall out. And sourdough? Forget about it—it wasn’t consistent enough in shape or crumb structure to merit consideration. 

In the end, I settled on two serviceable options: The Kaiser roll and the New England bulkie roll. Both are slightly enriched breads, which means they have a moderate richness and pillowyness to them. But they’re also sturdier than brioche or milk bread, holding up well to toasting, pressing, wrapping, and other forms of manipulation. Plus they often come in a square(ish) format because of the way they are baked. They’re bulky and big enough to fit nicely around the square filling components.

As for the technique, I took this opportunity to toast the cut sides in all the leftover rendered bacon fat (no waste, am I right?). By toasting the cut sides of the rolls, the softer exterior gives way to a sturdier toasted surface, followed by a cascade of texture and flavors from the eggs, cheese, and bacon. Toasting also mitigates any risk of soggy bread, which is important if the sandwich is sitting for more than a few minutes. 

The Condiment(s)

One could argue that condiments have no place on a BEC; that the bacon and cheese alone supply plenty of seasoning and sauciness. A little salt and pepper is all you might need.

But others choose to die on their condiment hill: Salt, pepper, ketchup; salt, pepper, hot sauce; chipotle mayo only. Far be it from me to flame the embers of a BEC condiment war. Here I included the least controversial option (or at least one you’d hardly notice while munching on a symphony of fat and richness): A light swoop of mayonnaise—whatever gets you up in the morning. The mayo is there to offset any of the residual dryness of the toasted roll, a little added insurance that every bite is perfectly sauced, seasoned, and accounted for.*

*If you hate mayo, feel free to leave it off. It’s your sandwich; you have agency.

The Wrap

Wrapping is an often overlooked step in the construction of a legit BEC. But it’s arguably the most important part of this recipe. For one, it makes the sandwich portable. Most importantly, wrapping ensures that the cheese melts fully and the interior steams slightly, which softens and warms the sandwich just enough. The wrap is the reason why a deli-style BEC stays hot, stays gooey, and has a unique texture. While insulated foil wrappers work best, a roughly 14x14-inch square of aluminum foil will work well as a stand in.

Why It's Worth It

So that’s how you make a bodega-worthy bacon egg and cheese at home. I mean, sure, you could go to a deli and order one up, saving you considerable time, effort, and probably a little cash. But this recipe captures the spirit of what makes a BEC special, because ultimately—whether you savor each bite or wolf it down in a frenzied hurry on your way to the L train—a bacon, egg, and, cheese is, at heart, a comfort food. And you can’t really put a price on dialing in comfort.