Perfect Your Copycat McDonald's McMuffin Eggs With A Mason Jar Ring

The Egg McMuffin is a morning favorite of Mashed recipe developer Lindsay D. Mattison, as she feels it's "one of the easiest grab-and-go breakfast sandwiches to eat while driving into the office." So fond of this menu item is she that she's willing to go to great lengths to duplicate the recipe at home. Well, maybe not such great lengths, since Mattison admits she "didn't even have to try very hard to make this a five-ingredient recipe" and says it only took 20 minutes from start to finish.

Mattison's copycat Egg McMuffin recipe includes no secret ingredients, since McDonald's chose to publish its McMuffin recipe back during the pandemic. The only real change she made was swapping out the Canadian bacon for a sausage patty, because that's her breakfast meat of choice. She does, however, boast of her "secret method to pulling it off."

The McMuffin, it seems, isn't made with scrambled eggs, but rather with a poached one. "If you open up the sandwich," Mattison tells us, "you'll find that it looks like an over-hard egg, except it's perfectly formed into a circular disc." While McDonald's own Egg McMuffin recipe calls for using metal egg poaching rings, Mattison says she "found that a mason jar ring worked the best," so this is what she's using here. She does say, though, that you'll need to preheat and grease the ring for the egg to come out looking nice and neat.

If you make use of your mason jars for non-decorative purposes, you may find there's a problem with the lids that makes them a bit too icky for egg-poaching purposes: They tend to get rusty. There's no need to run out and buy another mason jar simply to make a knockoff McMuffin, though, especially if you've already got lots of them cluttering up your cabinets.

If you have a round cookie cutter that's big enough to fit an egg inside, you could use this instead, or you could go for a low-budget option by opening both ends of a tuna or similarly-sized can. (Rinse it out first, of course, unless you've always dreamed of a McMuffin-Filet-O-Fish mashup.) Yet another, more flavorful option is to use an onion ring as an egg mold since, that way, you'll also get a tasty extra ingredient or McMuffin topper.

Of course, you could always throw convention to the winds and — gasp! — opt for a free-form poached egg. No, your sandwich won't be as symmetrical as a fast-food assembly line can make it, but isn't a little imperfection what gives homecooked food its charm? The egg is going to be hidden inside of the sandwich anyway, so unless you're in the habit of Instagramming every bite you take, no one ever needs to know. What happens between the buns stays between the buns, after all.