Japanese 7-Eleven Egg Salad Sandwich

If there's one tip I feel confident sharing about going to Japan, it's that your first meal shouldn't be at some iconic sushi place or secret yakitori spot only chefs seem to know about: It should be at 7-Eleven. Between the jet lag from the long flight messing up your sense of reality [if you're traveling from the U.S.], the flashing lights, and the crowds, the first 24 hours in a place like Tokyo risk feeling like an urban fun house. The Japanese version of the famous convenience store, where you can get canned iced coffee that rivals any pricey cold brew in the States, crispy karaage, as well as bento boxes, makes the transition a little easier. And then there's the egg salad sandwich.

After a lifetime getting them in school lunches, I never believed something as simple as an egg sandwich could be so perfect. But when I ate my first ever Japanese 7-Eleven iteration at 10 p.m. while sitting in my hotel room after a bumpy flight across the Pacific, when I was almost certain I was in the middle of a waking dream, I knew then that I was going to fall in love with Japan.

This sandwich, made with a creamy, yolk-heavy salad whipped up and served alongside a few spare chunks of whites on fluffy milk bread, stands out thanks to one special ingredient: Kewpie mayo. Why we Americans settle for lesser mayos, I'll never know; the yolk-only and vinegar mayo just hits different, as the kids say. It hit so different that when I got back home, more than the little dried fishes I sampled in a market in Kyoto, or the most perfect Negroni I've ever had, most of all, I couldn't stop daydreaming about that sandwich.

I make egg salad on a somewhat regular basis. So I thought, why not try to re-create that flavor I had on my first night in Tokyo? Thankfully, I'm part of a CSA that sends me too many eggs each week, and I'd raided the shelves of a market near my house, buying up as much Kewpie mayo as I could; my problem was the bread. I had tried several bakeries and came close to giving up, when one day, as I was browsing my local farmers market, I found it — perfect Japanese milk bread from the Lost Bread Co. in Philadelphia.

As I got to work, I could tell the first batch was a duller yellow, meaning I needed to limit the involvement of egg whites in the salad. About four batches in, I started to worry. The 7-Eleven salad had a creamy texture that I couldn't quite achieve. Was I whipping too hard? Was I not using enough mayo? Around this time was when I first started trying to track down somebody, anybody, connected with the company, but I kept coming up against dead ends. The few replies I did get were friendly, polite people in Japan who told me they couldn't help. I thought of asking a friend who lives in Tokyo to just go buy a sandwich and read off the ingredients to me, but that's when I started realizing I was betraying the spirit of the endeavor. This was about remembering something, so I kept working, making batches, and inviting over whoever I could to eat egg salad outside on my roof.

Finally, I reached a point of my testing where I was close but still missing something that I couldn't put my finger on — all I could hit on was the Kewpie mayo and that extra tang. I needed to smooth that out, and I remembered a friend telling me that the reason his Italian grandmother tossed some sugar in her sauce was because the canned tomatoes she bought had a tanginess that the version from her homeland didn't have. So, borrowing a little logic from my friend's nonna, I sprinkled a bit of sugar, mixed it in, and that was it. You can't beat the real thing, of course, but until I can get back to Japan and walk into a fluorescent-lit convenience store after a long flight and purchase a sandwich as my first meal, this homemade version that I spent a summer working and reworking into my own thing will do just fine.