Ramp Up Your Avocado Egg Toast!

We're obsessed with Avocado Egg Toast with Chili Crisp. After you follow our ramped-up avocado toast recipe at home, you'll be obsessed too.

Avocado Egg Toast with Chili CrispPhoto by2foodtrippers

Eating at home has motivated us to be more experimental in the kitchen. A prime example of our recent culinary creativity is layering mashed avocado and egg over toast and then sprinkling chili crisp on top.

Like us, you've probably eaten avo toast many times before. Who hasn't? Popular from Sydney to San Francisco as well as here in Lisbon, the open-faced sandwich is a cafe darling that's both enjoyable to eat and easy to prepare.

But have you eaten the hipster favorite with scrambled eggs and chili crisp? If not, you're missing out on avo toast nirvana - a level of culinary bliss that you can achieve in a home kitchen with just a handful of ingredients and no special tools.

Pro Tip: You need chili crisp in your kitchen and in your life. The Chinese condiment with fried garlic, shallots and chili oil is an addictive blend that adds salty, sweet, spicy and umami elements to pretty much anything.

The Skinny on Avocado Toast

Let's cut to the chase - avocado toast won't make you skinny. Each avocado has just over 300 calories and around 30 grams of fat.

Granted, most of the fat in an avocado is monounsaturated fat, i.e. the good fat. Plus avocados are chock filled with fiber and vitamins. In other words, avocados are both caloric and healthy.

The key is to eat the best avocado toast possible and make those calories count.

When we make avocado toast at home, we use a fully ripened avocado and really good bread that we buy at local Lisbon cafes and bakeries. At first, we added typical ingredients like fresh lime juice, olive oil, red pepper flakes and sea salt.

The result was solid, rivaling avocado toasts we've eaten while traveling in global cities like Amsterdam and London. Hooray!

But that was just the start of our avo toast journey. The next step was adding eggs.

Avocado and Egg Combination

Adding protein to avocado toast is a great way to transform the tasty snack into a meal. For us, adding an egg was a no-brainer since we typically eat avocados in the morning unless we're eating them in guacamole with chips.

You can use whatever egg preparation floats your boat - poaching, frying or scrambling. We typically scramble our eggs unless we roll them into French omelettes. So that's what we do in this recipe.

Once we started adding eggs to our avocado toast, it made sense to experiment with spices beyond pepper flakes and sea salt. The options are practically endless when it comes to avocado toast variations.

First, we tried piri piri sauce, a Portuguese hot sauce (similar to Frank's or Tabasco) that we add to a lot of food these days, and it tasted pretty good. But things went next level after we went shopping for our Asian pantry.

Chili Crisp - The Magical Ingredient

Did we mention that we love Asian food? From pho in Vietnam to dumplings in Hong Kong, we adore the flavors and cuisines throughout the entire continent. Now that we've embraced home cooking, it only made sense for us to buy a wok and various Asian food staples.

While shopping at a local Asian market, we picked up a jar of Lao Gan Ma Spicy Chili Crisp. You've probably seen it before - it's the jar with the picture of the angry Asian godmother. We get her angst. The jar makes us angry too since we know that it will eventually be empty.

Pro Tip: You can buy other versions of chili crisp but Lao Gan Ma Spicy Chili Crisp is the one that started the craze. You should be able to find jars in your local Asian market like we did or you can order jars from Amazon.

Obviously we're not the first to discover chili crisp. With a little research, we found oodles of articles waxing poetically about the Chinese condiment's addictive charms. We even watched an entertaining YouTube video that inspired us to add chili crisp to foods beyond stir-fried noodles and rice. It wasn't long before we started adding the condiment to everything, even tomato sandwiches.

Adding chili crisp to avocado and egg on toast has been a bit of a game-changer when it comes to eating avocados for breakfast at home. While not earth-shatteringly unique in concept, the chili crisp adds a spicy crunch along with a hit of umami thanks to caramelization of the fried ingredients... along with our friend MSG.

Fun Fact: MSG (monosodium glutamate) gets a bad rap since it allegedly causes some people to experience unpleasant symptoms like nausea and headaches. These effects have never been proven and glutamates exist naturally in many of the foods we eat.

How to Make Avocado Egg Toast with Chili Crisp

We get that Avocado Egg Toast with (or without) Chili Crisp is a simple dish. However, the dish's simplicity doesn't take away from the pleasure that it provides without a lot of effort.

Since this recipe doesn't have a lot of ingredients, you'll want to make sure that each element is the best possible. Buy (or bake!) good bread. Let the avocado ripen. Scramble the eggs with butter instead of margarine. Buy Lao Gan Ma Spicy Chili Crisp. All of these steps are under your control.

Cutting the Avocado

Be careful when cutting the avocado so that you don't cut yourself or make a mess. Either of these results would put an unnecessary damper on your meal.

We recommend using a sharp chef's knife and cutting the avocado over a cutting board. You'll want to slice into the avocado until your knife reaches the pit. At that point, rotate the avocado, while still on the board, and continue slicing all the way around.

The next step is to twist the avocado until it separates into two halves. All that's left to do is remove the pit which you can do by grabbing it with the knife in a single motion or scooping it out with a spoon. We recommend the spoon method for safety.

Assembling the Avocado Toast with Egg and Chili Crisp

After you've cut the avocado, you're ready to mash it and assemble your avo toast.

In this recipe, we scoop out the lush avocado flesh with a spoon and chop it into wedges with our chef's knife. We then slather it on top of freshly toasted bread, mashing it with a fork.

Pro Tip: Almost any sliced bread will work in this recipe but we typically use an artisanal sourdough boule that we cut into thick slices. As always, what you get out of a recipe is only as good as what you put into it.

We could stop here but where's the fun in that? Instead, we add a layer of scrambled egg on top of the mashed avocado. Not only do the eggs add a colorful panache, but the added protein also turns the toast from a snack to a meal.

The last step is adding the secret weapon - Lao Gan Ma Spicy Chili Crisp. This addition provides a boost of flavor that makes us smile with every crunchy, spicy, tongue-tingling bite. We also finish our toast with a sprinkle of sea salt.

This recipe is ridiculously easy to follow and should take you under 15 minutes from start to finish.

Scrambling the eggs takes the most time. You'll want to toast the bread at the same time.

We recommend serving the finished dish with freshly dressed salad and your drink of choice. We typically opt for coffee but white wine would work well too. If you're entertaining, you may want to serve Mimosas with your avocado toast creations.

This recipe was originally published on 2foodtrippers. Consider subscribing to 2foodtrippers if you enjoyed it.