It started with a food picture as so many of my culinary adventures begin.
It was a New York Times Food piece on Los Angeles’ Konbi Restaurant’s Egg Salad Sandwich–an elegant riff on the 7-Eleven Egg Salad Sando sensation in Japan.
But…it was hard. Really hard.
Slicing the sandwich to leave the egg halves intact challenged my limited skills. So, I kept trying. What was the downside, I kept asking myself? Eating all those experimental egg salad sandwiches? I could do that.
While my quest was going on, my good friend Joyce was making a trip to Japan with her daughter, Dina.
Test out those 7-Eleven sandwiches, I told them. They are supposed to be a real treat.
So, test they did–sending me photographs of their sandwich “finds” as they travelled around Japan. Boy, was I envious. There were no sandwiches, though, with that Konbi whole egg magic–just beautiful traditional egg salad sandwiches.
So, when Joyce returned from her trip, she turned up on my doorstep one day with lunch. There they were, beautifully prepared Konbi sandwiches direct from Joyce’s kitchen using the NYT recipe. We feasted and I pressed Joyce for tips on how to slice the sandwiches to retain their beauty.
Inspired by my friend’s success, I’ve kept going with my Konbi Sandwich efforts using the NYT Konbi Egg Salad Sandwich recipe here.
Here is my sandwich. It is kind of rustic looking in a Picasso-esque way but it is ever so good–test sandwich after test sandwich.
Guess I’ll just have to keep testing. Poor me.
Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen.
Konbi Egg Salad Sandwich
Ingredients
- 1 scallion (thinly sliced)
- 1 T. Kewpie mayonnaise (plus more to slather on the bread)
- 1 T. creme fraiche
- 1 1/2 t. rice wine vinegar
- 1 1/2 t. dijon mustard (plus more to slather on the bread)
- Kosher salt to taste
- 6 large eggs
- Flaky sea salt
- 4 slices milk bread or white sandwich bread or brioche (I used Japanese milk bread)
- Parsley for garnish.
Directions
- Step 1 Boil eggs. (Boil 2 eggs for 10 minutes until sort of soft-boiled and boil 4 eggs for 14 minutes until hard boiled. ) Remove eggs from boiling water and immerse in an ice bath.
- Step 2 Meanwhile, combine the scallion, mayonnaise, creme fraiche, rice wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, and kosher salt in a medium bowl to make the dressing. This is actually the quantity of dressing called for in the NYT recipe for 4 sandwiches but I found that the recipe needed a more generous amount of dressing for my sandwiches. You can halve the dressing if you wish.
- Step 3 Shell the hard boiled eggs once they have cooled and chop them finely. Mix with the dressing. Set aside.
- Step 4 Shell and slice the soft boiled eggs in half.
- Step 5 Trim the crusts off your sandwich bread.
- Step 6 Spread a bit of additional mayonnaise and mustard on the sandwich bread–mustard on one side, mayonnaise on the other. Arrange the sliced soft-boiled eggs down the center of the sandwich bread, yolk side down.The narrower tips of the eggs should point outward toward the crust-side of the bread.
- Step 7 Spoon the egg salad over the top of the halved eggs. Use your hand to press the top slice of bread down over the egg salad and egg slices to achieve a solid sandwich. Rotate the sandwiches by 90 degrees. Use a serrated knife to slice the sandwiches into thirds. Garnish with chopped parsley.
