15 Sandwiches That Are Even Better with an Egg Upgrade

If you’re ready to level up your favorite sandwich, the secret ingredient it might be missing is an egg. Eggs not only have the ability to make an ordinary sandwich extraordinary, but it can also make a pretty darned good sandwich even more delicious and indulgent. Fried eggs, scrambled eggs, and boiled eggs all have a place on sandwiches.

Adding an egg to an ordinary sandwich can sometimes turn it into a breakfast sandwich, but that’s not always the case. Eggs aren’t just for breakfast. After all, when you eat a cheeseburger with an egg on top, it doesn’t automatically become a breakfast sandwich. Instead, adding an egg elevates the sandwich’s quality by adding new flavors, textures, and more protein. So, you can try adding an egg any time of day to any type of sandwich and see just how much better it becomes — well, maybe not a peanut butter sandwich, but some swear by it anyway. In total, we’ve highlighted 16 sandwiches that taste even better with an egg to illustrate just what’s possible with just a little imagination.

One sandwich that deserves an egg upgrade is the humble BLT (bacon, lettuce, tomato) sandwich. It’s a sandwich known for having simple ingredients and big flavor. Crisp and smoky bacon, fresh and juicy tomato slices, crunchy lettuce, and your favorite mayo come together beautifully for this classic sandwich. However, drawing from how well bacon and eggs go together for breakfast and in breakfast sandwiches, it’s a no-brainer to imagine that egg would go nicely on a BLT.

To keep it neat, you’d be better off adding a boiled or fried egg to your BLT. A firm yolk works fine, but a runny yolk can help add a little moisture to the sandwich, much like mayo does for the traditional version. You can opt for toasted, untoasted, or even butter-fried bread (whichever type is your favorite). Stack the cooked bacon together on the bread with lettuce leaves, fresh tomato slices, and the egg. Perhaps add a bit of freshly ground pepper before finishing the sandwich off with another piece of bread on top. Then, suddenly, you’ve turned your ordinary BLT into a BLET — a bacon, lettuce, egg, and tomato sandwich.

Thinking about breakfast food and pairing it with eggs brings us to our second sandwich that deserves an egg upgrade: the chicken and waffles sandwich. While you might think the chicken and waffles pairing to be something new, they’ve been served together since the Pennsylvania Dutch started doing it in the 1600s. People add other breakfast items like maple syrup, hot honey, cheese, and bacon. So, why not add eggs to a chicken and waffle sandwich?

While most of the sandwiches on this list call for fried eggs, a chicken and waffle sandwich can easily accommodate scrambled eggs or runny eggs without making a big mess. After all, the squares in a waffle can hold more than just syrup. So, you’ll want to have the eggs next to the prepared waffle for best results. Then, top the rest of the chicken, waffles, and egg sandwich with ingredients like a fried chicken fillet and cheese, and serve with your choice of sweet breakfast condiment (maple syrup, honey, hot honey, honey butter, etc.).

While there are lots of ways to upgrade a grilled cheese sandwich, one you may not have considered is egg. However, when you think about all the restaurants that keep an egg and cheese sandwich on their breakfast menu (like the egg and cheese McMuffin at McDonald’s), it suddenly becomes an obvious option. Buttery and toasty bread, melted cheese, and fried or scrambled eggs are a big “Yes, please” from us.

Making one is simple. You need two pieces of buttered bread, two slices of your favorite grilled cheese-making cheese, and eggs prepared as you usually like. The sandwich should be stacked with bread, cheese, eggs, cheese, and then another slice of bread so that the melting cheese keeps the eggs inside the sandwich as you toast both sides on a hot pan. Suddenly, you’ve created a new breakfast sandwich: a grilled egg and cheese sandwich.

One other option for a grilled cheese and egg sandwich is to start with two toads-in-a-hole, which are pieces of buttered bread toasted in a pan with an egg cooked into the hollowed-out middle of the bread. Then, place cheese between the two pieces of bread and toast in a pan until the cheese gets nice and melty.

If you haven’t heard of a chopped cheese sandwich before, it’s probably because you haven’t spent much time in or near New York City, where you can find them all over, especially in Harlem bodegas, where the first one was born. A chopped cheese is essentially a chopped-up cheeseburger that’s served on a hoagie bun with lettuce, tomato, and condiments. All the melty cheese and the chopped meat on a hoagie rather than a round bun change the textural experience of the ordinary cheeseburger. However, its similarity to a cheeseburger is why it’s such a good candidate for adding egg, turning it into a sort of chopped royale burger with cheese.

Adding a sunny-side-up fried egg to a chopped cheese adds to the creamy gooeyness that the sandwich already has from all the melted cheese. Although, all that gooey cheese could help hold onto scrambled eggs, too. Wrap it up in paper like you got it straight from a bodega, and the scrambled eggs would be even less likely to tumble out as you eat. Of course, you could go a step or two further and turn it into a breakfast sandwich with a breakfast bread like a croissant and even use ground sausage instead of ground beef.

Burgers are no stranger to eggs, with the burger royale being a classic sandwich. However, patty melts don’t usually come with eggs. So, thinking about how well a traditional burger pairs with a fried egg and how well it works with a grilled cheese sandwich, the next leap is to imagine an egg patty melt.

A classic patty melt features a cheeseburger grilled between two slices of buttered rye bread, sometimes with grilled onions. Add an egg, and you’ve created an entirely different sandwich. It’s one part grilled cheese and one part burger royale, but it’s its own thing entirely because the caraway in the rye bread gives it a distinctive flavor from either of those two sandwiches. Plus, the egg adds an additional level of texture and flavor. An egg patty melt is another sandwich (like the egg grilled cheese) that people sometimes start with two toads-in-a-hole pieces of bread rather than ordinary bread.

The pastrami on rye is a fairly simple sandwich, which can be livened up a bit with the addition of an egg. This deli classic comes on flavorful rye bread with a delicious stack of spicy pastrami meat, spicy brown mustard, and pickles (either on the sandwich or on the side). There are some variations, like adding coleslaw as a topping and Russian dressing as a condiment. Some even mix corned beef with the pastrami. Another option is to serve the sandwich with tomatoes, lettuce, and mayo. With all those variations in mind, it’s not a far reach to imagine it with a fried egg on top, too.

A pastrami and egg sandwich on rye works well as a breakfast sandwich. The Pan restaurant in Long Beach, California, makes one for breakfast that starts with grilled rye bread, pastrami, and mustard as usual but adds Swiss cheese, grilled onions, two medium eggs over medium, and hashbrowns. There are no real rules for what goes on it. So, make it your way, using variations of traditional ingredients for a pastrami on rye, like pastrami, eggs, cheese, and Russian dressing — or whatever else you like.

Not too far off the idea of the egg pastrami on rye is the egg Reuben, just with a few extra ingredients and a different lunch meat. If you love all the bold flavors of a Reuben sandwich, you can turn it into a breakfast sandwich with the simple addition of a fried egg. Our mouth is watering just imagining how a slightly runny fried egg can add an extra layer of flavor to the sandwich perfection of a Reuben. While an egg Reuben is not a traditional breakfast sandwich, it’s one you might start to crave once you’ve tried it.

You have a choice to make here, though. A classic Reuben sandwich comes between two slices of rye bread, with the caraway in the bread being a big part of the flavor profile. So, you can opt to keep the rye bread (toasted perhaps?) or replace it with a more traditional breakfast bread like an English muffin if serving it for breakfast. We suggest either keeping the rye bread or adding a sprinkling of caraway seeds to keep the flavor profile right. The rest of the sandwich should consist of flavorful corned beef or pastrami, tangy sauerkraut, zingy Thousand Island dressing, Swiss cheese, and your fried egg. So, next time you have some leftover pastrami for breakfast, this could be a great option.

Like the Reuben, Cuban sandwiches combine lots of ingredients that pack flavor punches, such as smoky ham, succulent roast pork, tangy yellow mustard, tart dill pickles, and savory Swiss cheese. If you use a recipe for Cuban sandwiches that involves making your own pulled pork for the sandwich, it might also be imbued with garlic, citrus, and spice notes. Plus, the sandwich is served toasty. The fact that it contains ham, though, makes us think of breakfast sandwiches, and breakfast sandwiches deserve an egg. Make that egg a runny fried egg, and you’ve contributed not only to the flavor of the sandwich but also to the mouthfeel.

If you decide that you want to go full breakfast sandwich when making an egg Cuban sandwich, you can replace the normal Cuban, French, or Italian bread loaf with a more breakfast-forward bread like an English muffin. You could also opt to change the ham to Canadian bacon. Whatever bread or ham you choose, the egg elevates the sandwich to something entirely new and tasty.

If a pulled pork sandwich, like a Cuban sandwich, works with an egg, so does a BBQ pulled pork sandwich. But we’re thinking of it as being more like a pulled pork breakfast sandwich, where you’re replacing your normal pork ingredients like sausage, bacon, or ham with pulled pork and adding barbecue sauce. It’s a great way to use up leftover pulled pork when you find some in your fridge in the morning.

A fried egg works best for a pulled pork egg breakfast sandwich. You’ll load up your favorite buns with pulled pork, a fried egg, cheddar cheese, some barbecue sauce, and maybe some hot sauce. Rather than using a bun, you could also try it with an English muffin. A toasted bagel also works well since the cheese and egg can help keep the pulled pork from falling through. You can even make and toast the whole thing on the grill if you’re so inclined.

Club sandwiches are already stacked so high that fitting them in your mouth is a challenge. So, why not add another layer with an egg? Your mouth is up to the challenge of accommodating another layer, right? The club sandwich was invented in a New York club in the late 1800s and has been popular ever since. They’re built to be like two sandwiches stacked atop each other, sharing a third middle piece of bread that serves as the bottom of the top sandwich and the top of the bottom sandwich. The sandwich innards tend to vary, often containing cold cuts, bacon, lettuce, tomato, and condiments like mustard and mayo. Sometimes, it also contains ingredients like pickles, onions, cheese, and avocado, too.

With so many layers, you’re going to have to stack carefully, which is why an egg club sandwich needs two fried eggs rather than scrambled eggs. For structural strategy, you’ll probably want to place the fried eggs at the very top of each ingredient stack, such that your runny yolk (if going over-easy with your egg) can soak into the bread, and the egg can help make a solid barrier between more mobile ingredients like tomatoes or onions. Another option is using boiled eggs, which can make the sandwich ingredients resemble a Cobb salad, especially if using chicken as your meat.

If you really think about it, the ham, cheese, raspberry jam, and powdered sugar of a Monte Cristo sandwich make it seem more like a breakfast sandwich than a dinner sandwich. In the traditional sandwich, the bread is even coated in egg — kind of like French toast — before grilling. So, let’s rethink how we use eggs in this sandwich by also turning it into a topping, which takes the Monte Cristo into full breakfast sandwich territory.

To make a breakfast egg Monte Cristo, you’ll go ahead and make the sandwich as usual but include a fried egg as one of the ingredients inside the sandwich. So that means placing ingredients like ham, cheese, and a fried egg (mayo and Dijon mustard optional) inside two slices of bread and dipping the whole sandwich in a French-toast-style egg mixture (with ingredients like whisked eggs, maple syrup, and vanilla) before grilling it in butter. Once done, you’ll sprinkle the sandwich with powdered sugar and serve it with raspberry jam for dipping.

Pimento cheese sandwiches taste as good for breakfast as they do for lunch. So, why not make your favorite egg-centric breakfast sandwich with pimento cheese instead of your regular cheese? A pimento cheese and egg sandwich is the Southern breakfast sandwich you never knew you needed.

So, let’s look at how we might put such a sandwich together. While you can buy pimento cheese spread in a grocery store, we suggest making your own pimento cheese to get a better version, opting for sharp cheddar, or adding your favorite hot sauce or mayo along with pimentos. A pimento cheese and egg sandwich starts with using your favorite breakfast bread on top and bottom. If you want to go fully Southern with this sandwich, buttermilk biscuits are a good choice, but you could also choose a different bread like English muffins or bagels. For a simple version, you could fill the sandwich with just a fried egg and pimento cheese. However, you could also try adding breakfast meats like a sausage patty or crisp bacon.

The muffuletta sandwich originated in New Orleans in the early 1900s, using fluffy Sicilian-style muffuletta bread as the base for a sandwich made with lunch meat, cheese, and an olive-based spread. While the original sandwich doesn’t call for an egg, it can be improved with a fried egg and turned into a breakfast sandwich. 

Ideally, you’ll want to locate a muffuletta-style bun and split it in half to make a muffuletta egg sandwich. Because muffuletta buns tend to be fairly large (big enough to slice into multiple sandwich wedges), you may need a lot of fried eggs to cover it. You’ll also need some good Italian lunch meat slices, like soppressata, mortadella, capicola, and ham. While you can buy jarred versions of olive spread, like Marconi muffuletta mix, you can also find a muffuletta recipe and make your own spread. Provolone or mozzarella cheese completes the sandwich. So, add some eggs and enjoy. 

Vietnamese bánh mì sandwiches are full of delicious ingredients, and they just beg for an egg to be one of them. A traditional bánh mì comes on a crusty baguette and contains a filling of Vietnamese cold cuts or pork belly, pickled vegetables, fresh vegetables like cucumbers and peppers, herbs like cilantro, Vietnamese pâté, and condiments like mayo and soy sauce. There’s such a wide variety of twists on exactly what goes in the sandwich, including the filling. So, an egg bánh mì isn’t unheard of; it’s just not what you usually expect in your bánh mì.

To make an egg bánh mì, you’ll start with a baguette, sliced in half longways to accommodate all the ingredients. Then, you might slather mayo and other condiments on both pieces of the baguette, place pickled daikon radish and carrot strips on the bottom, add two fried eggs, top with fresh ingredients like cilantro and peppers, and squeeze on some lime juice. Whether you want to go with eggs only as your protein or combine it with other proteins like Vietnamese brawn (thi nguoi) or pork loaf (cha lua) is up to you.

The humble fried bologna sandwich is the final sandwich that we think deserves an egg upgrade. There’s no one way to make a fried bologna sandwich, but most basic ones include simple ingredients like fried bologna, mustard, and American cheese on white bread. Of course, you can use mayo or even add lettuce and tomato, but it’s still a fairly basic sandwich. However, it’s no longer ordinary once you add a fried egg.

The beauty of the fried egg and bologna sandwich is that you can fry your egg in the same pan you used to fry the bologna, which will infuse the egg with even more bologna flavor. Before the egg is done, go ahead and add your cheese on top to get it nice and melty before adding it to your sandwich. With a runny egg, you may not even want other condiments, but your fried bologna sandwich is yours to make as you please. You can even make it grilled cheese-style by using American cheese. So, it’s yet another way to elevate a grilled cheese sandwich beyond the ordinary.