The Mistake To Avoid If You Make A Breakfast Sandwich With A Baguette
There's plenty of variety when it comes to breakfast sandwiches, from the iconic McDonald's sausage, egg, and cheese McMuffin to more traditional sandwiches to kickstart the day. The popularity of sandwiches as a breakfast item worldwide is partly owing to their time-saving simplicity: It's easy to slap your choice of fillings between two slices of bread — you can even eat it on the way to work with minimal mess. There are many different open-faced breakfast sandwich options, such as Norwegian smørbrød, and even more choices of closed-faced sandwiches, including everything from comforting fast food breakfast sandwiches to Sicilian brioche gelato sandwiches.
Usually, if you plan to serve your sandwich hot, you'll want to toast your bread. However, there's an exception: If using a baguette as your bread of choice, you're better off leaving it untoasted. Baguettes already have a crunchy exterior and have a higher ratio of crust to soft interior. Toasting a baguette can give your sandwich too much crunch and make it crumble apart, plus, it can be a nightmare to extract toasted baguette halves from a toaster.
Why a baguette is a popular breakfast choice
Baguettes are synonymous with breakfast in France, where their popularity first soared in the 1920s after a new law forced bakers to start work later in the morning. Baguettes could be baked quickly due to their thin shape, and a century later, the French now consume six billion of them annually, making the bready batons an expected item in bakeries around the world. You'll find people in Spain enjoying a calamari bocadillo for breakfast, while in Vietnam you might start the day with a breakfast banh mi. In the U.S., breakfast baguettes are usually filled with varying combinations of cheese, bacon, ham, eggs, and sausage.
Thanks to their crusty exterior, baguettes retain their structure so they won't sag when picked up, even when loaded with ingredients. Also, since baguettes have plenty of crust, which is less absorbent than the fluffy center, your sandwich will hold wet ingredients better without falling apart.
For sandwiches, use a baguette that's wide enough to hold plenty of your filling. Also, try matching the baguette to your filling: A sesame seed baguette filled with cream cheese and smoked salmon could serve as an alternative to the traditional bagel. Finally, if you're not able to find the perfect baguette for your breakfast sandwich needs, you can make your own. Anyone can make great crusty baguettes at home; there's nothing more satisfying than the taste of a freshly baked baguette you've made yourself.
How to make the best breakfast baguette sandwich
There's no wrong way to eat a baguette, but there are some tips worth knowing to get the best results for a breakfast sandwich. Firstly, if your baguette is a little old, it may already be too hard and crunchy to be ideal for a sandwich. In this case, there are plenty of uses for stale bread, but you can also revive a baguette with a douse of water and a few minutes in a hot oven, making it sandwich-ready once again.
When slicing your baguette for making breakfast sandwiches, the size of your slices should be considered. You can vary how big your sandwiches are based on your appetite, but as a rule of thumb, five to seven inches of a reasonably wide baguette should be enough for a portion. You can slice horizontally through a whole baguette first, then slice vertically into portions. Slicing the baguette into portions first and then halving each portion helps it maintain structure when being sliced so it doesn't get too compressed.
If possible, try to make sure your filling choices contain a variety of different textures. This is part of the reason why bacon, egg, and cheese work so well together in a breakfast baguette. The crispy bacon, creamy, springy egg, and gooey cheese combine to create an ultra-satisfying bite, with the sturdy baguette providing a crunch and a bed for the other flavors. Just remember, keep your toaster far away from it for ideal results.