TikTok's Fried Sandwich Boats Left Me With Burnt Bread, Dry Eggs, And Grease In My Veins

Welcome to Ragebite, a column where Dennis Lee finds the most absurd, anger-inducing recipes the internet has to offer and goes where no one has gone before: actually cooking them himself.

In this week's edition of Ragebite, I was challenged by my coworkers to create a unique version of egg salad based off a video from the TikTok account @tastyframe07 (if you missed the last one I wrote, it involved blue Gatorade hot dogs and a stunning visual). The video, which is below, is narrated by what sounds like an AI-based male voice with a stilted cadence, and it has some, uh, interesting elements.

@tastyframe07

🔥 Try making bread this way... no one will believe how amazing it turns out! 😱🍞 Soft, fluffy, and absolutely irresistible! BBakingMagicBBreadLoversEEasyBreadHHomemadeBreadFoodHacks

♬ Latin-style guitar that feels melancholy, rush, run(1396879) – SUNNY HOOD STUDIO

If you can't be bothered to watch the video (I wouldn't blame you if you can't), this content creator fries slices of white bread into a canoe shape, then tosses a bunch of egg salad crap into a Ziploc bag and squishes it together. Part of what is amusing is that the broken narration doesn't follow what's in the video; the actions on screen aren't fully in line with what the narrator instructs you to do. The end result is a rough egg salad concoction served in kind of a hot dog bun-looking vessel, which actually doesn't sound bad on the surface, but the journey to get there was definitely a bumpy one.

Overall, the ingredients in this sandwich are pretty simple. There's just white bread, eggs, bacon, mayo, green onions, mustard, and paprika. If I made a regular egg salad using those ingredients, I wouldn't bat an eye, as these things aren't outside the norm. But the first bit was a challenge: I was supposed to fry the bread.

In order to get it to stay the desired shape, I needed to fold a slice and spear it with a toothpick, according to the video. That seemed simple enough, but it turned out that the white bread didn't really like to stay shut with a toothpick, as the crumb was so smooth it just wanted to open back up. So I had to be aggressive with the folding, which endangered the bread's overall integrity at the hinge.

I'll be real when I say I absolutely hate frying anything. I'm genuinely bad at it, and the smell never goes away later. The video's content diverges from its narration a bit during the frying step too — the verbal instructions say to use 4 tablespoons of oil in a skillet, while the video shows someone frying bread in at least 2 cups of oil using a small saucepan.

4 tablespoons of oil in a shallow skillet didn't seem like enough to me, but sure enough, it was at least enough to soak into the exterior of the bread. But the issue was the heat (or perhaps, my lack of skill). The instructions said to use medium heat, which I did, but I ended up almost instantaneously burning my first two pieces of bread. I still maintain that frying is the worst, and I will not accept any further arguments at this time.

Here's where things got dicey (or fun, depending on your perspective). First of all, this egg salad filling had some strange ratios. From what my coworkers and I could decipher, the narration says you need six hardboiled eggs, a "handful" of green onions, 1¼ tablespoons of bacon bits, ½ tablespoon of mayo, ½ tablespoon of mustard, and 1 teaspoon of paprika. That is not at all what's depicted in the video portion. The person in the video just appears to be winging it, tossing two eggs in a Ziploc bag without measuring any of the other ingredients, while the video simultaneously instructs you to use a bowl. I hope this person has not written any cookbooks.

For the sake of today's piece, I was mostly taking the narration as gospel, but I was not going to pass up an opportunity to squish a bunch of eggs with my hands. Could this be a genius technique? I put everything in the bag as the video said and started on the squishing.

I could tell one thing immediately, and it was that there was nowhere enough mayo or mustard to keep this egg salad loose. The eggs crumbled apart while I pretended my egg salad was a really weird stress ball, but it didn't seem like they were really sticking together, and it became difficult to see if I'd broken them apart evenly. It didn't take long for me to become extremely bored.

My wife was entertained by watching me, however, and took the bag from me and took it upon herself to start squishing it. It took her about the same amount of time to get bored, and she soon handed the bag back to me. I could tell the contents of the bag were still pretty dry; the mayo wouldn't work its way through the bag uniformly, no matter how hard we tried. Martha Stewart would not approve of this egg salad hack, and now neither does Dennis Lee.

I snipped the corner off the Ziploc bag, just like in the video, and started piping its contents into the least-burned slice of bread I had made. What came out looked, well, like something I probably shouldn't mention on an esteemed food publication like The Takeout. The egg whites were in coarse (some might say "rustic") chunks and the whole thing was strangely kind of khaki-colored thanks to the dark red paprika mixing in with the egg yolks. This was not at all what the video depicted, by the way; its version was a glossy and wet egg salad sandwich that looked much more appealing.

Upon my first big bite, I wasn't entirely displeased — it just tasted like an egg salad sandwich on appealingly fried bread. But I came to realize something almost immediately: There was almost no salt in the egg salad, save the bits of bacon in it. And there was barely any bacon in it either, just 1¼ tablespoons of chopped bacon for six whole eggs. It was also painfully dry, basically just mushed up hard-boiled egg with almost no mayo gluing it together. While I could see the paprika, I definitely couldn't taste it. At least the bread was crisp thanks to being fried, but it did leave me with one undesired parting gift.

My fingers were absolutely covered in grease. And I could taste a bunch of it in my mouth. So not only did I eat a bunch of unseasoned egg salad, I'd followed it up with a shot of oil. If I'd hoovered a bunch of these things down (the burnt ones were a blessing in disguise), I'd have been in some serious digestive trouble in a few hours. But since the egg salad was no good, I only ate about half of one before I called it quits. I was looking forward to the idea of egg salad in taco-shaped fried bread, but there's no way to fry white bread without it soaking up a ton of grease, plus the egg salad itself has to be good. That's what I get for recreating something that was narrated with a weird AI voice. Plus, I should have known something was off when I was standing there squishing eggs in a plastic bag. Actually, now that I think about it, there were red flags everywhere, and I ignored every single one of them. This just goes to show that egg salad is already perfect as-is, and trying to mess with a good thing, is in fact, a bad one.