To think about what to make for every meal every day can be a dreadful task. If you’ve been there, these are a couple of hot sandwich recipes using everyday ingredients found at convenience stores in Japan!

You might be thinking “Well, I’ve never made one before and it sounds like a lot of work…”, but hold that thought. It can actually be done in no time at all and upgrade what are typically looked at simple convenience store ingredients if you use a sandwich press.

Hot sandwiches can be complicated depending on the recipe, but we picked out a couple of surprisingly delicious and simple ones from recipes that have been taking off on the net.

Out of the countless recipes on the internet, we chose two with ingredients you can easily find at any of Japan’s major convenience stores, without any need for a fry pan.

For our first recipe, we are going to skip the use of butter on the bread on this sandwich since it calls for mayonnaise (as in Japanese mayonnaise, like Kewpie) instead. The two main ingredients are smoked chicken breast and ready-to-eat egg salad, both found at Japanese convenience store Lawson.

Slice the smoked chicken in half, place it on your preferred sandwich bread (we used shokupan, fluffy white Japanese bread). Drizzle with mayonnaise on top.

Add the egg salad as much as you want on top of the chicken.

Once you press the top slice down, cook the sandwich in the sandwich press until it’s done!

The sandwich has an amazing smoky flavor from the smoked chicken that doubles when cooked in the press. You can’t tell it is made with convenience store ingredients.

Fried chicken is a very popular go-to hot snack from convenience stores. For this fried chicken sandwich, we decided to use Lawson’s popular fried chicken found at the hot food section, L-chiki.

The recipe calls for convenience store fried chicken, sliced cheese, and cabbage. If you don’t have cabbage at home, you can always get the sliced cabbage with the rest of the ingredients at a convenience store, too.

Place the ingredients in the order of; bread, cheese, fried chicken, cabbage, and the final slice of bread. Condiments are up to you but we found the melted cheese to be quite enough!

The volume of this sandwich was so satisfactory, and made for a great homemade "junky" convenience store sandwich.

Sandwich press machines can be very affordable and purchased for 1,000 yen and up. If you are tired of your routine meal plan, or perhaps have exhausted the menu of gourmet readymade sandwiches found at convenience stores in Japan, give these recipes a try!