The key ingredient for the ultimate Japanese egg sandwich.

Japan may be well known for its traditional cuisine, but fusion cuisine here is just as exciting, and one particular fusion food that’s captured our hearts is the humble “Kissaten Tamago Sando“, or in English: “Coffee Shop Egg Sandwich“.

Kissaten are retro coffee shops that serve up not just tea and coffee but desserts and light meals as well. The kissaten egg sandwich is a coffee shop mainstay that conjures up an air of nostalgia for the Showa era (1926–1989), the heyday for kissaten, and what makes them unique is the fact that they contain thick, fluffy omelettes.

In Japan, omelettes are a thing unto themselves, cooked in rectangular frypans and gradually rolled over in layers to create thickness while retaining a light, moist and fluffy texture. It takes a bit of skill to learn how to make them properly, with chopsticks involved in the rolling, and while they taste great, they require quite a bit of time and patience to make.

So what do you do when you’ve got a craving for a thick-omelette Coffee Shop Egg Sandwich but are too lazy to make one? If you’re like us, you turn to the Fluffy Japanese Omelette Maker, which we’ll be trying out today.

This gadget promises to take all the hard work out of omelette making, and does away with the need for a pan as it’s designed to be used in the microwave.

Keen to test its effectiveness, we gathered together the following ingredients: eggs, white bread, mayonnaise, milk, and salt.

The first step is to crack the eggs into the container and add two teaspoons of milk, five grams of mayonnaise and a small pinch of salt. Then you pop the yellow plate into the container, cover it with the lid and…push the plate handle up and down.

A bit of force is required to raise and lower the plate with one hand, and the lid will come off if you don’t hold it down with the other hand, so it takes a little bit of getting used to. According to the instructions, the ingredients come together after a minute of plate-pumping, and then it’s time to cook it all in the microwave.

We removed the yellow pumping plate and popped the lidded container into the microwave, cooking the mixture for one minute on 500 watts. The next step is to take the lid off, stir the mixture about 10 times, and then it’s back into the microwave for 30-40 seconds at 500 watts.

Microwaves vary, however, and after 40 seconds, our egg was still runny so we heated it again until it was solid.

Taking it out of the container, we were surprised to find that it did actually look like a thick omelette!

We placed it in between two slices of bread and cut the sandwich in half diagonally to get that coffeehouse egg sandwich look. It had the distinct flavour we were hoping for, but unfortunately our creation left a lot to be desired in terms of looks, so we decided to have another go at making our dream sandwich.

This time we were aiming for a uniform thickness and a result that looked more like the egg sandwich on the packaging. We had a hunch our mistake lay in the cooking, so we decided to raise the temperature of the microwave to get a more even surface on the omelette.

The higher temperature worked a treat, because when we removed the omelette, it was much more uniform, both in colour and shape.

And when we used the omelette to make our egg sandwich, it looked much more like the ones served up at a kissaten.

And what about the taste? It was, in a word, delicious! It had a wonderful creaminess to it and a light, airy texture that satisfied all our egg sandwich cravings.

Now that 2020 has us spending a lot more time at home than usual, we’re determined to keep pumping this Fluffy Japanese Omelette Maker until we perfect the art of kissaten egg sandwich making.

Priced at 660 yen (US$6.20) plus tax, it’s a small investment that saves a lot of time and effort, and it now has a place at home in our kitchen with our other newly acquired gadgets for making gyoza and homemade chips.

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