Breakfast sandwiches go beyond the Golden Arches

THERE'S A LAUNDRY list of reasons (nutritional, environmental and culinary) why I shouldn't eat an Egg McMuffin. But come on! Something about the combination of meat, egg and cheese on a toasted English muffin is just perfect.

Even so, until recently English muffin breakfast sandwiches were an experience I reserved for the oxygen-deprived atmosphere of an airborne 737. My daughter and I tend to buy them at the airport, which is why we call them "plane snacks."

But something has changed. I'll explain. Last year I wrote a book, and my publisher sent me on a book tour. For a few weeks I flew around the country and was accompanied in each city by a media escort to get me to my appointments on time with no food on my face. So one morning I got up at 5 a.m., went straight to the airport, had a plane snack and caught a flight to Portland.

I was met at PDX by Kevin Sprager. Tall, bespectacled and food-obsessed, Sprager reminded me of someone: myself.

"Let's get some breakfast," he said. "I know this place with great breakfast sandwiches."

"I already ate."

"Trust me, you'll want to try this place."

Fair enough. He took me to Bakery Bar, on Northeast Glisan Street. Half a dozen breakfast sandwiches were on the menu, and it was immediately apparent that Sprager was right. I ended up with the No. 5: fried egg, cheddar and bacon-apple-caramelized onion jam. As I was ordering, however, I noticed Sprager was holding something in his hand. "I brought in some eggs from my hens."

"You brought your own eggs into a restaurant?"

"Well, they know me here. I developed their English muffin recipe." It was a quintessential Portland experience with a hint of taxi tout thrown in. Sprager ordered the morning Reuben, which is also his invention: fried egg, pastrami, Gruyere and dressing on an English muffin.

My sandwich was phenomenal: tangy sourdough muffin, meaty jam and a nicely cooked fresh egg. The house-made hot sauces (I went with the carrot-ginger-habanero, but the roasted tomato-chipotle wasn't shabby, either) were just a bonus.

"There were so many yummy combos that I thought of, I thought, let's just go with a variety of them," said Bakery Bar owner Jocelyn Barda.

A couple of weeks later, I was back in Seattle on Tom Douglas and Thierry Rautureau's weekend radio show on KIRO. During the break, we chatted about the breakfast sandwiches at Bakery Bar. "Next time you're in Portland, you've got to try these," I said. "Best I ever had."

"Better than mine?" asked Douglas.

Oops. I didn't admit I had no idea Tom Douglas served breakfast sandwiches. "Well, theirs are sourdough," I stammered.

"Aha," Douglas replied. If he'd said, "Mine are sourdough" (they're not), there would have been a lot of dead air that day because I would have actually died.

Naturally, I went to Dahlia Bakery at the earliest opportunity. The bacon, egg and cheddar sandwich is served on a fluffy, crisp English muffin created by Dahlia's head baker, Gwen Grande. It's more akin to a fast-food sandwich than to Bakery Bar's adventurous creations, but much better than any actual fast-food sandwich. "When you get something that's made from scratch, made with real ingredients, it tastes better," said Douglas. "We cure our own hams, we make our own English muffins, we use organic eggs. We think about every ingredient that goes in there and try not to !@#! it up."

Douglas serves three sandwiches per day: bacon, veggie and some other meat (usually ham). I asked why he doesn't expand the menu. Space is extremely limited, he said. OK, say he had all the room in the world? "Slow-roasted mole. Anything cooked over a wood fire. Roasted tomatillo salsa." And he likes chipotle Tabasco on his sandwiches.

I have my eye on one more breakfast sandwich, and it's not a Northwest creation. At Momofuku Milk Bar in New York, part of chef David Chang's empire, they serve a weekend sandwich featuring a deep-fried poached egg (seriously), bacon and caramelized onions. I was so inspired by this that I started to make my own English muffins from the recipe in the Momofuku cookbook. Here is what I learned: Making English muffins takes a very long time. They are better than store-bought English muffins but not that much better. I'd leave it to the professionals. And no, I did not deep-fry a poached egg.

So now when I get the plane-snack craving at home, I'll combine good bacon, a fried farm egg, a little grated cheddar, hot sauce and a buttered English muffin (homemade if I'm feeling obsessive). And try not to, you know, mess it up.

Matthew Amster-Burton is a Seattle freelance writer and author of "Hungry Monkey." Mike Siegel is a Seattle Times staff photographer.