Air fryer bacon, egg, and cheese TikTok recipe is no-mess and surprisingly good

Welcome to AirFryDay, where — you guessed it —every Friday Mashable covers the latest trends, dispenses advice, and reviews recipes for your air fryer.

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It’s difficult to screw up a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich because even the worst BECs are still kind of good. Still, I was skeptical of a TikTok recipe that promised to cook it all at once in an air fryer.

How would the recipe fully cook bacon, while not burning bread, while still melting the cheese, and managing to produce a decent egg? Hungry and in need of a sandwich, I set to test that recipe for this week’s AirFryDay. And you know what, not too spoil too much, my skepticism was misplaced. It was actually a pretty good and incredibly easy recipe.

The idea came from a TikTok by user @JimmyTheHib, which has racked up some 1.3 million views. It’s a pretty straightforward recipe, there’s no real trick to it, but here are the basic details.

Ingredients

• Four slices of bread (this recipe makes two sandwiches)

• Two eggs

• Three slices of cheese, one slice halved to split evenly between the sandwiches

• Two or three slices of bacon, cut into roughly slice-of-bread length pieces

• Salt, pepper, and a hot sauce of your choosing

• Toothpicks or small skewers

Recipe

• Spray air fryer basket with nonstick spray.

• Place four slices of bread in basket and spray with nonstick, butter, or whatever you have on hand.

• On two slices of bread, lay down 1.5 slices of cheese in order to achieve total bread coverage.

• On top of the cheese, lay down four cut-pieces of bacon. Two pieces should face one way, two should face the other direction, forming a two-layer crosshatch of sorts that achieves total bread coverage.

• Use toothpicks or (in my case, small wooden skewers) to pin the bacon to the bread and prevent it from moving during the air frying process.

• Using the backside of a spoon, create a yolk-sized divot on the two bare pieces of bread.

• Carefully crack an egg on each bare slice of bread, placing the yolks in the divots.

• Season the eggs with salt and pepper.

• Carefully and slowly, load the basket into the air fryer. Air fry for 8 minutes at 380 degrees.

• When finished cooking, remove the basket and pour hot sauce on the egged slices of bread (if you want hot sauce).

• Combine each egg slice of bread with a bacon slice and chow down on your sandwich.

Here’s how @JimmyTheHib’s process looked.

I set out to copy his results, subbing in regular bacon for turkey bacon for no other reason than I wanted regular bacon.

I picked out four slices of bread, making an extra sandwich for my lovely wife/photographer in my AirFryDay BEC extravaganza. The recipe from @JimmyTheHib did not call for preheating, so the whole thing is assembled in the air fryer basket, which is part of the appeal. It’s so, so easy and creates virtually no mess.

OK, so following the recipe, I sprayed my air fryer basket, then arranged four slices of bread inside, spritzing them with canola oil.

Next, the two slices of bread got 1.5 slices of cheddar cheese apiece. I opted for thick-cut cheddar instead of @JimmyTheHib’s American because I like cheddar and felt it would hold up to eight minutes of air frying better. I believe I was correct, looking at our respective results.

After cheese it was time for bacon. I tried to cut wide and less fatty sections from a few strips of bacon. This allowed for two layers of bread coverage and less rendered bacon fat seeping into the bread, which I worried would make things soggy during the cooking process. Then, since I forgot to buy toothpicks at the store, I broke the tips off wooden skewers and pinned the bacon down, just like the TikTok.

If you look in the above picture, you can also see yolk-sized wells in the two bare slices of bread. I created those with the backside of a spoon. Just be careful as you press down, because it’s easy to rupture the soft bread.

Next, I carefully cracked an egg on each bare slice of bread, dropping the yolk directly into its divot. Then I seasoned the eggs with salt and pepper.

Carefully — like I was carrying a precious little baby — I picked up the air fryer basket and slid it into the air fryer. Then, per @JimmyTheHib’s instructions in his viral TikTok, I turned that sucker to 380 degrees and set it for eight minutes.

Here’s what awaited me, eight minutes later (after I removed the skewers).

The topside of the bread was deeply charred, about a minute or two from fully burnt. The cheese was beautifully melted and deliciously crisped on the edges. The bacon ranged from fully cooked but floppy to crispy. But it was cooked. Looking at the egg, I strongly suspected there was zero chance it was still runny.

I plated the sandwiches and, since I love hot sauce, I doused the egg sides in Valentina extra hot.

Now a curious thing about this recipe. The underside of the bread was mostly lightly toasted, with some spots of char. That’s because the four slices of bread took up so much real estate in the basket that it blocked hot air from circulating too much of the underside. This wasn’t a totally bad thing, to be honest, because there was plenty crunch the charred topside. But here are the sandwiches, one with the lid closed, the other hot sauced.

Then it was time to cut the sando in half and house it. I sliced through on the diagonal and, like I expected, the yolk was hard. Not even a little soft, it was pretty much the exact texture as the center of a hard-boiled egg. But still, not a bad looking sandwich.

The verdict: It was a good BEC. It’s not an elite bacon, egg, and cheese, but that’s not what we’re going for here. Give me a half hour to cook perfect bacon, fry an over-easy egg, thinly slice some red onion, then basically construct a bacon and egg grilled cheese and, I tell you what, I’ll make you an incredible BEC. But I’ll also have a bit of a mess on my hands, left cleaning up at least two pans, a cutting board, onion scraps, and grease splatter on the stove. It’ll also take a decent chunk of time to make that sandwich.

The magic of this recipe is its ease. If I didn’t have to stop to document the process, I could’ve made this whole thing in like ten minutes, including the eight minute cooking time. And there was practically zero mess to deal with, beyond washing the air fryer basket, which is nonstick and super easy to clean.

The recipe gifts you a good sandwich in ten minutes with zero mess. It’s a perfect idea for, say, a workday morning but you’re too hungry for your usual Greek yogurt.

Sure, the yolk was cooked into oblivion. I have zero idea how @JimmyTheHib had a runny yolk after eight minutes at 380 degrees. But it was tasty nonetheless, so who cares?

In just a few minutes of cooking, I had a super easy, super fast bacon, egg, and cheese. A couple minutes later, I had a full stomach. What’s wrong with that?