A biscuit breakfast sandwich plucked from a fast-food window and eaten on the go is convenient and satisfying. But building your own stack of eggs; savory meat; creamy cheese; and a tender, buttery base pushes this breakfast icon well into luxury territory.
Behind the Recipes
All-Time Best Biscuit Breakfast Sandwiches
Sausage, egg, and cheese on a biscuit is always a home run—but strategy and smart techniques make it a grand slam.
By and
Published June 4, 2024.
You can eat the sandwich as soon as you assemble it, when the package is at peak warmth and meltiness. But better yet, you can customize it to perfectly suit your taste.
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My dream breakfast sandwich would go something like this: On the outside: a biscuit that’s delicate and buttery yet resilient enough to hold up to fillings. On the inside: tender, sunny eggs; a slender, snappy sausage patty; and a sharp slice of cheese. It would make for a hearty, fulfilling start to the day without being overly rich.
It took some layer-by-layer analysis, but I managed to craft a biscuit breakfast sandwich that checks all these boxes—and then some.
I tweaked one of our go-to biscuit recipes to add a touch more sturdiness. Then, I worked out a way to make every component of the sandwich the same shape in order to make a supertidy stack, and I got the portions of each just right.
As a bonus, I made the recipe as efficient as possible. It yields six sandwiches, so you can feed a crowd for brunch or assemble your sandwiches, store them in the fridge, and reheat them over a few days.
Getting out of bed has never been so easy.
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Science: Tender, Craggy Biscuits Are Easier with Melted Butter
The typical first step in making biscuits is rubbing cold butter into the dry ingredients. These bits of butter don’t just enrich the biscuit—when they melt, the water in the butter turns to steam, which provides lift, and then they leave behind small spaces that make the interior of the biscuit lighter and more tender. They also lend the exterior some appealing cragginess.
The only downside? Rubbing in the butter is time‑consuming and messy. Fortunately, we devised a shortcut in our drop biscuit recipe that we adopted here: We melted the butter and then stirred it into the chilled buttermilk, where it solidified into tiny beads. When we mixed the wet and dry ingredients, those beads were dispersed as thoroughly as if the cold butter had been rubbed in, but it took a lot less work and time.
The Biscuit: Slimmer and Stronger
I was immediately drawn to our tender, fluffy, and unfussy drop biscuit recipe as a base but knew I’d need to make some alterations. Drop biscuits are charmingly irregular in shape, which is fine in most contexts, but it could impede my ability to make a batch of neat stacks.
The other issue is that drop biscuits can be delicate and crumbly, and I didn’t want my sandwiches to fall apart. The following tweaks addressed these two issues.
Baking the biscuits in a cake pan:
Rather than drop the biscuits, I patted the dough into an 8-inch square cake pan and cut it with a bench scraper to create six rectangular pieces. This not only made the whole batch uniform but also resulted in crustier edges and bottoms, which made the biscuits more resilient.
Scaling down the recipe:
My first batch of cake pan biscuits came out almost 2 inches high, meaning they were too tall to eat when filled. So I scaled down the recipe by a third to ensure that they’d be easy to eat.
The Sausage: Split and Stackable
A sausage patty can topple a breakfast sandwich if it’s too thick, and its round shape means that corner bites of my rectangular sandwiches wouldn’t get any of the flavorful meat. I opted instead to use breakfast links, which are conveniently preportioned.
To make the links fit perfectly inside the biscuits, I butterflied them, placed them cut side down in a cold skillet, and then pressed them into slim 4 by 2-inch rectangles. All that was left to do was strip off the casings and quickly sear.
The Cheese: Placed Strategically
In addition to contributing flavor and richness, cheese bolstered the cohesiveness of the stack. I placed half a slice of pepper Jack (selected for its hint of spice) on the biscuit bottom and the other half beneath the biscuit lid and then placed the sandwich in the oven (still warm after baking the biscuits) for 5 minutes.
The cheese melted and flowed, creating a delicious mortar.
The Egg: Folded Neatly
Breakfast sandwiches can host all kinds of egg preparations, but I like folded, omelet-style eggs the best—they’re easy to make, stay neat in the sandwich, and don’t contain any runny yolk that could make a mess. I used the same skillet that I’d used to cook the sausages to cook a wide, thin layer of beaten egg, which I cut into rectangles that perfectly fit my biscuits.
Reheat Your Leftovers
If this recipe makes more sandwiches than you need, simply assemble all the sandwiches and wrap and store any leftovers to reheat them for another day. Leftover biscuit sandwiches can be refrigerated for up to three days—just know that the crusts of the biscuits will be softer.
- To reheat, simply place an unwrapped sandwich on a plate, cover it with a bowl, and microwave for 1 minute. Then, uncover the sandwich and let it sit for 1 minute before serving.
