The Breakfast Club
Restaurateur Jeremiah Schenzel serves the ultimate breakfast sandwich at Daps Breakfast & Imbibe
Photo: Alexander Zeren
“We are kind of obsessed with sandwiches,” says Chef-Owner Jeremiah Schenzel of Daps Breakfast & Imbibe in Charleston. "What is the most epic sandwich that comes to mind? That's the club sandwich. Everyone knows it. [It’s] the king of sandwiches.”
So, when Schenzel set out to create a new breakfast sandwich for the menu, he knew he wanted to go big. Schenzel and his team started playing around with the flavors of breakfast—eggs, bacon, toast, coffee—and tried to find ways to marry those components with the framework of the club sandwich. “That was the base idea,” he says.
The double decker sandwich starts with folded eggs, lettuce, and tomato between three layers of toasted wheat bread, to keep things simple and familiar, but the rest of the build certainly doesn’t stick to tradition. The centerpiece of the sandwich is a house-made turkey sausage, although “it's more of a meatloaf,” says Schenzel. He mixes ground turkey with a combination of spices, onions, and a touch of Cardamaro before stuffing the mixture into a baloney sock. The sausage is poached, coated in a barbecue-inspired coffee rub, and roasted briefly to “extract the oils from the coffee beans.” After it cools, the turkey is sliced into medallions for service.
To build on those iconic breakfast flavors, Schenzel wanted to do something that would set his sandwich apart. That’s why “bacon comes in the form of cheese,” he says. “You can imagine the amount of bacon we go through, and we are big on not wasting [product].” The recipe has evolved over time, with a variety of soft cheeses used as the base, but these days Schenzel is turning to ricotta. The cheese is whipped and slowly emulsified with the reserved, warmed bacon fat. You “get the bacon flavor,” says Schenzel, and “it becomes this emulsified spread” that results in a texturally similar substitute for mayonnaise.
“It was great, but I was missing something,” he says. “I'm one of those people that if I make a sandwich at home, I immediately put chips on the sandwich. I think all sandwiches are better with chips.” Schenzel adds bloody mary-flavored Lowcountry Kettle Potato Chips to bring a crunchy texture and more breakfast flavor to the sandwich.
The stacked sandwich has become a mainstay on the menu and a customer favorite. “When you read it, there's a lot going on—bacon whipped cheese, coffee-rubbed turkey sausage, potato chips,” says Schenzel, “but we can take these elements and make it one cohesive thing. You can have those flavors and still experience something new.”
