SCRAMBLED EGG SANDWICH
on hong kong style white bread

My friend’s family owns a very famous cafe in Hong Kong called the Australia Dairy Company. I saw pictures of the famous egg sandwich and was thoroughly unimpressed. How can scrambled eggs pressed between two slices of bread be so good? But the massive following proved that this sandwich was something special. So I thought, hey, I know how to cook some pretty good scrambled eggs—let’s give it a try.

First: the eggs. I’ve studied how to cook eggs by reading On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. Basically, the secret to really good scrambled eggs is seasoning them before hand (salt helps the proteins coagulate, so if you season them after they’re done cooking, they will over-coagulate) and cooking them low and slow; constantly moving the eggs with a spatula, creating ribbons, and then turning off the pan while the eggs are still runny and letting them finish by residual heat. It’s not necessary to use butter and cream, but I do cause it yields silkier eggs. I also add a dash of fish sauce and sugar. Not enough so that it’s overwhelmingly fishy or sweet, but those two secret components really enhance that eggyness. If everything is done right, the result will be the best scrambled eggs you’ve ever had—trust me.

Second: the bread. Wonderbread certainly wouldn’t do. You could easily crush it into the size of a golf ball with little effort, meaning the bread is not very dense at all. I figured the smartest thing to do was to buy white bread from a Hong Kong-style bakery. It’s almost twice as expensive as its cheap American cousin, but it holds its shape, it’s noticeably more flavorful, and it doesn’t get soggy easily.

Once I combined these two simple ingredients, I finally understood. It was some crazy David Blaine shit going on in my mouth. I might not ever have the opportunity to try the official sandwich from the Australia Dairy Company, but I do now appreciate their sandwich.

ham & eggs
with sweet potato hash & jamon iberico foam

It took two weeks but the hind quarter of the pig we got from Marin Sun Farms had finally finished brining for our ham. We flavored the brine with the basics, plus a shit ton of rosemary and just let it sit in the walk-in until it was ready. We used it in this dish with a sous-vide egg, a simple hash using the ham scrap and sweet potatoes, and then we made a foam out of jamon iberico trimmings to dress the plate. Shit was ridiculous.

'longsilog'
longanisa sausage, torta, garlic rice, & fried egg

This Filipino breakfast is a nice change from its tired American cousin. Egg yolk is the simplest, most delicious sauce. This would be amazing in burrito form.
 

okonomiyaki corn dogs
twice-fried corn dogs, bonito shavings, okonomiyaki batter, kewpie, okonomiyaki sauce

I cooked these the same morning as the Green Eggs & Ham Takoyaki. They’re fried Costco corn dogs dipped in okonomiyaki batter, and then fried a second time.

Kind of tasted like a Japa-dog, but in corn dog form.

green eggs & ham
tako-yaki style

This is not a true takoyaki, of course (since ‘tako’ means octopus and there is no octopus present in these), but mini-omelets made using a takoyaki pan. It’s just green eggs (blanched scallions blended with scrambled eggs), cubes of swiss cheese and ham, and more chopped scallions. They’re cooked just enough on the outside so that their insides are still nice and gooey.

mexican breakfast
with orange churro, horchata milkshake, arroz con leche

Now this was a lot of fun. We chose Mexican desserts to do a breakfast trio:

donut - orange churro

cereal - horchata milkshake with cinnamon toast crunch crumbs

rice pudding - arroz con leche

Bite into the hot churro, take a sip of the cold milkshake, and temper your palate with the rice pudding. Or dunk your churro in the milkshake as a dip. Or pour the milkshake over the rice pudding as a sauce. A very playful dish.

The search for the perfect waffle stops here:

My roommate, Dan, and his girlfriend, Christina, cook waffles all the time. She bought him the waffle-maker as a gift awhile ago and they’ve played with many different recipes since, but they could never get it evenly brown and risen. I even busted out my Robuchon cookbook and tried, what I thought would be, fool-proof waffle recipes, but they turned out to be a fail, too. We always blamed the fact that it was a non-rotating waffle maker and it just wasn’t meant to make the perfect waffle.

Then I woke up one morning to the all too familiar smell of waffles, but arrived at the kitchen to find the difference in this recipe almost instantly. It was a pristine-gold waffle. Crispy, salty, airy. Amazing.

So, a big thanks to Dan and Christina for sharing it with me. Now you try.