Up Your Breakfast Sandwich Game With This Tangy Cheese

Certain breakfast sandwiches are classics because they pack their ingredients in so perfectly that they just haven't left any room for ubiquitous improvement. The iconic bacon, egg, and cheese, for example, has secured the brand recognition to reign supreme for generations. In its ideal form, the BEC will forevermore require American cheese to defend its ante meridiem dominion. But you might crave a break from even the best now and then, and you can give your bacon, egg, and cheese a boost of flavor by clearing the way for another dairy variety now and then.

Goat cheese is just the unexpected twist to upgrade BECs and other handheld morning meals from the everyday. While the standard American cheese is prized, in part, for its maximally melty quality and subsequent ability to coat other ingredients, goat cheese is already spreadable and warms to an even creamier consistency. While it has the mild tang of something like a plain yogurt, it is also neutral enough to balance all that bacon's satisfying grease, or cut through a breakfast sausage's own unique, salty, savory flavor profile, should you prefer a SEC.

Goat cheese can be wonderful in all those bacon or sausage, egg, and cheese recipes, and it's adaptable to most other breakfast sandwiches as well. It's tops schmeared onto a bagel in lieu of cream cheese, and layered with lox or smoked salmon, capers, and thinly sliced red onion. You can also, of course, make it meat/fish-free with sliced tomato, fresh basil, salt, and pepper on some toasted sourdough.

One of the finest ways to give sourdough the breakfast sandwich treatment is in sweeter preparations. For the ever-growing jelly-on-an SEC contingent (our numbers are growing every day) goat cheese and some grape Smucker's just tastes a little more elegant than the typically salty American, which can overwhelm when combined with the fruity sugar infusion. But, give goat cheese the starring treatment on something like a croissant or a length of baguette, pair it with a fancy compote, and you've got a decadent breakfast sandwich unlike most of what you'll find in the drive-thru or at the bodega.