Eggs and toast is a near perfect meal. It’s easy, cheap, filling, delicious, and texturally pleasing. A soft scramble or yolky fried egg on crunchy toasted bread makes my mouth happy, but you can streamline the experience with toasted panko bread crumbs.
There are two ways you can use panko to add a gorgeous buttery crunch to your eggs. In both cases, you’re going to start by toasting them in a generous amount of butter. Once they’re golden, you can either crack an egg directly on top of the crispy crumbs, or swirl them into a soft scramble.
Give your fried egg whites some buttery, crunchy love
The yolk is the best part of the fried egg, but frying the whole thing on top of browned butter panko makes the white a whole lot more enticing. If you’re familiar with the frico egg, it’s just like that, only the base is bread and not cheese. It’s like eating a fried egg on toast, except there’s even more texture, thanks to the crumbs’ small size. (Smaller particles almost always translate into a greater surface area for browning.)
Panko-crusted fried eggs
Ingredients:
2 tablespoons of butter
3 tablespoons panko bread crumbs
2 eggs
Salt & pepper
Add the butter to a nonstick pan over medium heat. Once it starts to foam, add the crumbs and sprinkle in an even layer over the butter. Let cook for two minutes, until the mixture starts to smell nutty and toasty, then crack two eggs over the crumbs.
Season the eggs with salt and pepper and cover the pan with a lid or heat-safe plate. Let cook for 3-5 minutes, until the whites are completely set. Transfer to a plate and serve with any “extra” crumbs and browned butter on top.
Add unexpected texture to your scrambles
This recipe, which I first saw via @intothesauce on TikTok, inverts the classic “eggs on toast” format, making the eggs the vehicle for the bready bits.
I made my panko scramble without any cheese—because cheese can hide so many sins—and it was buttery, savory, and comforting. Other than that, I followed the instructions pretty closely, though I did stir my panko a few times to help it brown evenly, as crisping the panko ensures the crumbs don’t get mushy in the eggs. I will be adding cheese next time, because I love cheese, but cheese-avoiders should delight in the fact that they don’t need it.
Panko scrambled eggs
Ingredients:
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons panko bread crumbs
2 eggs
Big pinch of salt
Melt the butter in a nonstick pan over medium heat. Once it starts foaming, add the crumbs and fry, stirring once or twice, until they are a solid golden brown. Scramble the eggs with the salt in a jar, then add them to the pan, pushing them around in large sweeping motions until they are just set. Serve immediately.