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Breakfast Grilled Cheese with Scrambled Eggs

Soft-curd eggs folded into melted cheddar between buttered, mayonnaise-crusted bread.

Prep
10 min
Cook
12 min
Makes
Makes 2 sandwiches
Jump to the recipe
A toasted cheese sandwich cut open, egg and melted cheese inside
Photo: Lloyd Mitchel Guanzon / Pexels

Two techniques, both counterintuitive, and both worth the paragraph.

Scramble the eggs low and slow, and take them off while they still look wet. Eggs are around 75% water and heat squeezes it out; hard, fast scrambling produces dry curds sitting in a puddle. Low heat, constant movement, off the pan at the point where they seem two-thirds done — they finish in the residual heat and then again inside the sandwich.

Mayonnaise on the outside of the bread instead of butter. It sounds wrong and it is what most diners actually do. Mayonnaise is oil emulsified with egg, so it spreads evenly on soft bread without tearing it, has a higher smoke point than butter, and the egg proteins brown into a more even, more golden crust. Nobody tastes mayonnaise in the finished sandwich.

Serve it with crispy air fryer potatoes and it becomes a proper breakfast.

Medium-low heat in the pan. High heat gives you a dark crust around cheese that has not melted, which is the defining failure of a grilled cheese.

Toasted sandwiches stacked on a plate
Photo: Dewi9 / Pixabay

A scrambled eggs sandwich, printed

Soft-curd eggs folded into melted cheddar between buttered, mayonnaise-crusted bread.

What you need

  • 4 slices of good white bread
  • 4 eggs
  • 2 tbsp heavy cream
  • 1½ tbsp (20 g) butter, for the eggs
  • 1 cup (120 g) mature cheddar, coarsely grated
  • 2 tbsp mayonnaise, for the outside
  • Chives, salt and black pepper

Soft scrambled eggs, then the sandwich

  1. 1 Beat the eggs with the cream and a pinch of salt until completely uniform — no streaks of white left.
  2. 2 Melt the butter in a non-stick pan over low heat. Add the eggs and stir constantly with a spatula, pulling the setting edges into the middle.
  3. 3 After 4–5 minutes they will be soft, glossy and still visibly wet. Take them off then, not later, and stir in the chives.
  4. 4 Spread mayonnaise on one side of each slice of bread. That side faces out.
  5. 5 Build each sandwich: bread, half the cheese, half the eggs, the rest of the cheese, bread. Cheese on both sides of the egg glues the sandwich together as it melts.
  6. 6 Cook in a dry pan over medium-low for 4 minutes a side, pressing gently with a spatula, until deep golden and the cheese has run.
  7. 7 Rest 1 minute before cutting, or the filling slides out.

On cheese and on lids

  • Grate the cheese yourself. Pre-grated cheese is dusted with anti-caking starch and it melts badly.
  • A lid on the pan for the first two minutes traps enough heat to melt the cheese before the bread is too dark.