Posted by Erin Zimmer, September 4, 2008 at 4:00 PM
Earlier this year, Starbucks pitched a new game plan: Focus more on coffee, less on noncoffee things. Get back in touch with their roots. But the breakfast sandwiches are still available (now in less-fragrant form), bottled juices still get stocked in the fridge, and yesterday, a "healthier" breakfast line-up with fewer calories and more protein settled in behind the glass counter. Here's our take on the new noncoffee products.
Power Protein Plate, $4.95
330 calories with peanut butter, 260 without (about one-third of your daily protein intake)
The plastic tray includes a hard-boiled egg, some apple slices, a tiny sprig of grapes, two squares of white cheddar, a mini wheat bagel, and a squeezable ketchuplike packet of peanut butter. If you fetish over mini things that get stuffed into a hot-dog-size home, this is all you. While the hard-boiled egg was bland—and served cold, instead of the warm, like Mama fed you—it's not green! So that's always good.
Starbucks Perfect Oatmeal, $2.45
140 calories for just oatmeal; 100 calories for nut medley; 100 calories for dried fruit; 50 calories for brown sugar
"Perfect" is a strong word. As a religious oatmeal eater, I rarely come across an imperfect bowl, but for perfect, the Quaker man himself would have to serve it to me. The small cup comes with two options of 100-calorie packets: mixed nuts (almonds, walnuts, and pecans) or dried fruit, and a 50-calorie pack of brown sugar. I appreciate the purist approach to oatmeal and hands-on toppings. (No weird caramel syrups or Dinosaur eggs inside.) But north of $2 seems like too much.
We've all been there. Groggy-eyed, you spot the egg carton in the fridge, grab for it, and, the minute you pick it up, realize by its lightness that there's only one lonely egg left. Olga poached her single egg and made a great-looking sweet-potato-and-broccoli hash to supplement it. What would you do make for breakfast with a single egg?
I've gotta be honest with you: I don't think I'd ever heard of eggs on yogurt before. But why not? I love eggs. I like* yogurt. Why not try putting them together? To me, it's an unlikely combo that sounds just crazy enough to work.
Serious Eats intern Emily Koh shot this photo and uploaded it to Photograzing recently. As she says, "You can't go wrong with poached eggs, and combining it with the yogurt and the slight spiciness from the chili oil = genius combo."
Thanks for making me ultra hungry during my morning web-surfing, EKoh. :-P
* I won't kid you: I like yogurt but eat it mostly as part of a healthy breakfast.
If you can't swim like Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps, what makes you think you can eat like him? Jon Henley of The Guardianattempts to eat Michael Phelps' breakfast and lunch on video and inevitably fails. It's no wonder considering what he tries to eat:
A small (rather than gargantuan) portion of porridge; half a doorstep-sized sandwich made of white bread and butter and containing a fried egg, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise (Phelps hoovers up three); half a five-egg omelette; one slice of French toast (out of three); and two choc-chip pancakes (out of three). Plus two cups of coffee.
Henley does put in a good effort—until he gets that, "I'm going to throw up," look on his face.
How 'bout that Michael Phelps last night? Wondering what he eats to fuel the kind of performance we've been witnessing? Well, on Monday night NBC's Bob Costas reported a tidbit of jaw-dropping info: Michael Phelps recommended calorie intake is 8,000 to 10,000 calories.
Costas read Phelps' typical breakfast order from Pete's Grille in Baltimore, Maryland, as is recounted in Phelps' autobiography Beneath the Surface:
Start with three sandwiches of fried eggs, cheese, lettuce, tomato, fried onions, and mayonnaise; add one omelet, a bowl of grits, and three slices of French toast with powdered sugar; then wash down with three chocolate chip pancakes.
The kicker: This was his typical meal as a teenager. Now he trains in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where local restaurant owners are giddy with excitement describing how good he has been for business. We found a video where they do just that. Watch it, after the jump.
Clockwise from top left: Pan Electric's Toastrite; British Diamix's No Type 01; Toast-O-Lator Model C, Glass-Sides; and Daaledrop's KMD 21191.
A truly great breakfast takes a spark of inspiration—and what better place to find that inspiration than an online toaster museum, which features porcelain toasters, copper toasters, and one toaster that sold on e-Bay for over $5,000? In case the 189 toasters on the web museum aren't enough, the site also provides links to toaster art and toaster films.
Another change at Starbucks in light of recent underperformance? The reheated breakfast sandwiches—yeah, they're making them smell less. While the McMuffin lookalikes received poor marks on taste from us, customers still found them perfectly appetizing. It was the smell that irked them.
Meaty, eggy aromas were infiltrating the undertones of Kona Blend and Caffè Verona in the air. "While relatively popular, the smell interfered with the coffee aroma, and therefore the store experience," according to Ad Age. The article noted that products have been reformulated to eliminate this "smell" problem.
Back in January, CEO Howard Schultz said the breakfast sandwiches were on the way out, but we swear we've spotted them behind glass counters at multiple branches. A trip to a nearby Starbucks this morning confirmed our suspicions: plenty of sandwiches and a confused barista who hadn't heard of impending smell-related tweaks.
Who knows how the "last breakfast" topic came up with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but his response was pretty delicious:
"I always said if I had one breakfast to eat before I die, it would be Wonder Bread toasted, with Skippy Super Chunky melted on it, slices of overripe banana and fresh crisp bacon."
Not a bad idea, Mike, and pretty down-to-earth of you, considering you're worth about thirty billion dollars.
What would mine be? Perfect pancakes, crispy at the edges and tender inside, served with real maple syrup and sweet butter; six slices of Allan Benton's superlative bacon; two super-fresh eggs softly scrambled on a separate plate—I don't want the syrup touching my eggs—all washed down with a glass of really cold milk and a glass of equally cold fresh orange juice.
What about you, serious eaters? Last breakfast fantasies?
Morning, serious eaters. It's Friday, so we say treat yourself to a fried dough tire. Pastry chef and blogger Shuna Fish Lydon of the blog Eggbeaterrecently did at San Francisco's Dynamo Doughnuts, which just opened Tuesday. Lydon is a lover of all walks of doughnut life—"even if they were the wallflower kind or still wore high-waters in college."
Have you ever met fried dough you didn't like? Dynamo Doughnuts: 2760 24th Street, San Francisco CA 94110 (map); 415-920-1978
Brunch haters are few and far between, but McDonald's is one of them. That 11 a.m. deadline for breakfast foods is so strict, leaving absolutely no wiggle room between Egg McMuffin and Big Mac service. Is it so wrong to crave an egg sandwich at lunchtime and double meat patty at 9 a.m.? Or both at once? Don't they stock everything in the back anyway?
Two self-proclaimed "Internet Celebrities" Dallas Penn and Rafi Kam hopped into a fast food spaceship to another cosmos where McDonald's brunch sandwiches exist. Arriving at 10:55 a.m. just before the changing of the guard, they ordered breakfast then hopped back into line at 11:01 a.m.
The result: Canadian bacon, the "round eggy thing," fries, Premium Chicken Select Strips, and honey mustard, all inside the McGriddle bread. Yes, they went there. Because they call the shots, "not the clown." After the jump, watch the meal rebellion, but be aware, the language is NSFW. [via SoGoodBlog]
Good morning, serious eaters. To start the day, I submit to you these bacon, egg, and cheese Combos. I have to say, I can't think of a better breakfast combo than bacon, egg, and cheese, but I'm groggily freaking out about these things. They're at once compelling and repulsive. I can't help but wonder if Ed Levine would consider replacing the baked potato chips in his ideal diet breakfast with these. Probably not. But that gets me thinking about weird breakfasts. The most unconventional breakfast I've done in recent memory has been cold pizza—though that's not really too far out there. Maybe the cold-pizza omelet I made on the advice of a friend? What's the weirdest or most embarrassing thing you've ever eaten for breakfast? 'Fess up!
Good morning, serious eaters! Here's a good way to start the day—and the week. A crazy gallery of old-school cereal boxes. I think my faves here are King Vitaman and Tutti Frutti Flavored Twinkles. They remind me of the days when I'd eat nothing but Fruity Pebbles when it came to cereal. (I can't believe my mom let me get away with that.) What was your cereal of choice as a kid—or even today?
After months of experimentation I have finally come up with my perfect diet breakfast. I wish what I am about to tell you would be of more comfort to those of you who strive to eat a reasonably healthy diet, but it most assuredly isn't. In fact, what I'm about to tell you may be horrifying. Because I haven't settled on Greek yogurt or granola or toast made from whole-grain bread as my ideal diet breakfast, though I have grown to appreciate each of those foods in recent months. In fact I am using all three of the above-mentioned items in my diet breakfast rotation, along with a toasted bialy with the lightest schmear of whipped cream cheese.
But for this past week at least, my ideal breakfast turns out to be a 0.8-ounce bag of Kettle Bakes potato chips, a 20-ounce bottle of Diet Coke, and a banana. I find it has everything I'm looking for in a breakfast.
Unlike Stonehenge, which mysteriously had no defined origins or intent, the Baconhenge is here for a reason. To celebrate the goodness of bacon-wrapped french toast "stone" sticks that surround a frittata of mushrooms, potato and onions.
Baconhenge is not yet a UNESCO World Heritage Site but has the potential to inspire sacrifices, like breakfast cereal.
From May 22 to May 31, I traveled across country, from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco, California. Here's a snippet from that week. —Erin Zimmer
This breakfast sandwich, a cousin of Eggs Benedict, doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. That's how you know it's underground in the breakfast world. At Causeway Cafe in Wrightsville Beach Island, North Carolina, Eggs Neptune have all the Benedictine ingredients (poached egg, English muffin and golden hollandaise), except the star ingredient here is crab meat.
The crustacean can be too overwhelming for some breakfasters, especially at a time when dishes don't veer far from eggs, sugar and butter. (Isn't it too early for crab? Wait, is that possible?!) But at Causeway Cafe, a laid-back eating shack in the four-mile-long island of Wrightsville Beach near Wilmington, Eggs Neptune hit the spot. Especially with the beachy vibe and saltiness of the country-fried potatoes, also served with the dish.
McDonald's Southern-style chicken biscuit tastes like an oversized McNugget in a buttery, greasy biscuit that you've had so many times before.
It's too late to snag a free Southern-style chicken biscuit from McDonald's—the breakfast promotion lasted today between 7 a.m and 10:30 a.m—but if you missed out, don't worry; it wasn't totally free. As we mentioned before, there was a medium or large drink caveat, so the "freebie" cashed in at a minimum of $1.50. Overall, it wasn't the most mind-blowing experience since McDonald's already sells biscuits and chicken McNuggets, and together, they approximate this same taste concept.
But borderline mind-blowing is that you can eat fried chicken for breakfast without hauling to a less-accessible Chick-fil-A or sneaking in last night's leftovers. McDonald's only has the normal-sized sandwich, whereas Chick-fil-A also does an adorable mini version.
McDonald's sells the Southern-style chicken biscuit for $1.99 and $3.39 for the value meal with drink and hash browns. So again, today's "deal" wasn't a huge deal.
Despite being subjected to the familiar "don't play with your food" parental instruction throughout my childhood, as an adult I can't help but succumb to a little makeshift breakfast sandwich action. The most popular (and easiest to assemble), has got to be the irresistible pancake-bacon combo, or you can get a little more serious, as in the case of the waffle sandwich I posted about here last September.
It's always fun to create your own monstrosity, but I have a tremendous amount of respect for the chef who saves you (and by that I mean my wife) from the embarrassment of a self-made sandwich at the table. Such is the case with the seared smoked pork loin and French toast sandwich served for brunch at Thuet, a Toronto restaurant-bakery-boulangerie-atelier run by Alsatian chef Marc Thuet.
It's with sadness that I write this post, as it's to inform you that the man who invented the Egg McMuffin has died. Herb Peterson, age 89, passed away Tuesday in Santa Barbara, California, where he operated six McDonald's.
The inspiration for Peterson's 1972 creation was the dish eggs Benedict, which he was very partial to, a company spokesman said. Interestingly enough, the now ubiquitous breakfast sandwich was first served open faced on a buttered English muffin.
Channeling the spirit of Uncrustables and Hot Pockets, in April Kraft will launch Bagel-Fuls, frozen bagels which come prestuffed with Philadelphia cream cheese. Bagel-Fuls are part of the segment called "hand-held breakfast sandwiches."
"Consumers are not spending a lot of time cooking these days," said Chitra Ebenezer, the director of marketing for the new brand. "Breakfast is one meal occasion they really struggle with."
And struggle I do. The constant battle to keep cream cheese stocked in my fridge has left me a cold and bitter person. The daily time-suck of visiting a bagel store so that someone else can cut and schmear my bagel has exhausted me to the point of tears.
Kraft, in its benevolent kindness, has heard my pleas, but I still have some questions.
Posted by Erin Zimmer, January 31, 2008 at 5:00 PM
Or, 'It's the Espresso, Stupid!
Whether you loved or hated the Starbucksian take on the McMuffin, it will officially be yanked, according to today's New York Times. After making some calls to Washington, D.C., locations, it appears that Monday is the national D-Day, which leaves just three days of devouring the pre-assembled shrink-wrapped sandwiches.
A Brief Starbucks History
Pre-Breakfast Sandwiches
In 1971, they sell just roasted beans and brewing equipment.
In 1982, they add live-made coffee and espresso drinks, all the while fearing that a foray into the beverage world will distract them from bean-roasting.
Along came pastries and banana breads... some ambiguous time in between...
Post-Breakfast Sandwiches
In 2006, they have jealousy issues with McDonald's and create six warm breakfast sandwiches: sausage; peppered bacon; sun-dried tomato with ham; reduced-fat turkey bacon; and eggs Florentine with spinach (all of which include egg and cheese).
On January 30, 2008, that dream dies. With a pending economic recession, Starbucks embraces a turn-around plan, focusing on its original plan: coffee.
When it comes to tiny sandwiches, my devotion is huge. I love tea sandwiches in all forms. I'm totally in favor of the slider trend that's been rolling across the country the last couple of years. Heck, I even started a burger blog pretty much as an excuse to talk about White Castle and its awesome sliders.
So when I saw the Chick-n-Minis at Chick-Fil-A while visiting my parents last week in suburban Kansas City, I was all over them.
Terrifying or adorable? Angie Naron's googly-eyed breakfast conjures up many conflicting emotions. "Oo, it looks delicious! ...Wait, they're all staring at me. Perhaps I will skip breakfast today." [via Cute Overload]
A piece on the op-ed page of the New York Times suggests that for health reasons we all switch the Thanksgiving meal to breakfast. Jennifer Ackerman writes:
So here is my proposal for revamping our holiday tradition: Invite the relatives for a morning feast of turkey frittata or wild turkey hash on English muffins, topped with poached eggs and hollandaise sauce.
Ackerman even claims there is historical precedence for an early bird Thanksgiving.
Everyone, or just about everyone, has (or should have) and needs a go-to breakfast, the one they eat just about every weekday morning without thinking, a breakfast that is easy to prepare, can be eaten while reading the paper, and is a breeze to clean up. It should be reasonably filling, not too fattening, and nutritious according to some objective standard.
Your go-to breakfast can't be bacon and eggs or pancakes with sausage, because those are too unhealthy, fattening and time-consuming. Either of those could be your weekend go-to breakfast, but that's not what we are talking about here.
This delectable little morsel is a chwee kueh, or "water cake." A popular breakfast item in Singapore, it may not sound terribly appetizing (or plausible), but for most locals, the thought of sinking their teeth into these gems is enough to make mouths water.
They're made from a mix of one part rice flour to almost five parts water—hence the name. Steamed in shallow aluminum cups that look like tiny flying saucers, the "cakes" themselves are bland, but the best will boast an incredibly soft yet dense texture and yield effortlessly to the bite. They are then topped with sweet-salty chye por (preserved radish), which have been bronzed in a generous amount of lard, along with garlic, shallots, and sesame seeds. As with most local dishes, there is the omnipresent dollop of chili paste on the side.
Health concerns and a desire to reach out to the Muslim community—who are forbidden all things porcine—have led to many hawker stalls proudly sign-posting: "We use vegetable oil only. No lard." But ask the old-timers and they'll agree—it's just not the same without. (Psst… gram for gram, lard has "less saturated fat, more unsaturated fat, and less cholesterol" than butter!)
About the author:Wan Yan Ling, Serious Eats's overseas summer intern, is an impoverished grad student and sourdough finger-crosser living in Singapore. She can usually be found in the kitchen procrastinating on "real work," or online tracking down obscure recipes. Ling thinks eating alone is no fun, and she still believes in hand-mixing.
Food blogger Marvin of Burnt Lumpiawhips up a breakfast recipe post that somehow manages to connect such disparate elements as ube (a type of yam popular with Filipinos), pancakes, and Prince—as in The Artist. The result is a flapjack with a golden-brown exterior and a heart of royal purple.
On our way to Cape Cod for a little family R & R, we stopped for a bite (actually, more than a bite) at 3:15 p.m. at Nick's Diner, a hipster diner in what appears to be Providence, Rhode Island's newly fashionable West Side. My son, Will, ordered the turkey sandwich, my wife, Vicky, ordered the pulled pork and cheddar, and, in the name of responsible food research, I ordered the zucchini and potato soup, the steak sandwich, and a short stack of buttermilk hotcakes with rhubarb compote and whipped cream on the side. My wife grimaced as I ordered the pancakes. "How could you do that?," she asked.
Hilton Hotels are launching their Hilton Breakfast Program across their North American properties by this summer, featuring a system of color-coded labels "to assist guests visually in managing their dietary needs. The labels denote whether the menu item is low-cholesterol, low-fat, high-fiber, low-calorie, high-energy or an indulgence."
As Gridskipper's Omri Ceren said, "Who the hell is this for? Are there Jews who'll accidentally eat bacon if it's shaded in fuschia on the menu? Are there diabetics too stupid to avoid adding extra sugar to their pancakes? And if there are diabetics like that, why are we preventing evolution from disposing of them as is right and proper?"
Also I wonder what pink labels mean in the program—I mean, everyone knows pink means Paris! Maybe they'll be dishes fit for her chihuahua...
Marilyn Marter of the Philadelphia Inquirer says we might be in the middle of "a full-fledged breakfast war", with big companies fighting for portions of the $78 billion breakfast market. Ron Paul, president of a research firm that tracks the food-service industry, "estimates that 15 to 18 percent of breakfasts are currently being sourced from restaurants (compared with about 25 percent of dinners), with McDonald's, the largest restaurant chain, in the lead, feeding 27 million Americans daily." They've of course long had a serious breakfast menu, but the competition is trying to catch up: Burger King rolled out a ten item one last year, Dunkin Donuts is experimenting with gussied-up offerings, and even chains you would necessarily expect breakfast offerings from, like Starbucks and Subway, are getting into the action.
The market for at-home breakfast foods is no slouch either—projected sales for this year are $29.6 billion—so don't be surprised to see more and more breakfast items, of the healthy, organic kind as well as just the plain convenient, on the aisles and in the freezers every time you visit the supermarket.
Robin Mather Jenkins of the Chicago Tribune, lamenting that people don't eat breakfast sausages anymore because they think of them as fatty, shares a recipe for maple-sage breakfast sausage, lean and made from scratch. She says, "It's simple to make, and impressive. It takes just a few minutes to prepare, and it is many times better than store-bought, especially if you mix it up a day or two ahead of the time you plan to cook it, so the flavors can blend." Freeze the patties, and you can have breakfast sausages anytime you want!
The director Robert Rodriguez has a new movie out, Grindhouse, which I haven't gotten around to seeing yet, but I did love 2005's Sin City, his adaptation of the Frank Miller comic book. Turns out if you get the Sin City DVD, one of the special features on it is the second episode of Rodriguez's 10-Minute Cooking School, for his Sin City Breakfast Tacos:
He makes his tortillas from scratch, and uses both lard and butter! I may have to fight his new girlfriend Rose McGowan for him.
infraredherring made the french toast waffles from Dorie Greenspan's cookbook Waffles: From Morning to Midnight. The happy report is that they "come out deliciously eggy (like french toast) and slightly crisp around the edges (like waffles!). They were easy to make and thoroughly delicious!"
What keeps cooks faithful to one recipe is often some confluence of ease and surprise. David Eyre’s pancake possesses both. A batter of flour, milk, eggs and nutmeg is blended together, then poured into a hot skillet filled with butter and baked. Anyone confused? I didn’t think so.
The surprise comes, appropriately, at the end, when you open the oven door to find a poofy, toasted, utterly delectable-looking pancake. This soon collapses as you shower it with confectioners’ sugar and lemon juice, slice it up and devour it. It’s sweet and tart, not quite a pancake and not quite a crepe. But lovable all the same.
Frantic lifestyle? Need to prepare something fast for breakfast, lunch or evening meal? Or maybe you just want a traditional, comforting meal for the family in the colder weather.
Well, we’ve brought back the traditional SPAM® Fritter to fit just that bill. What’s more, all the hard preparation work is done for you – new SPAM® Fritters are ready to be ovenbaked for 15-20 minutes and served with your favourite vegetables or breakfast menu.
If you can't read the copy on the container in the photo above, the Fritters are described as "succulent pieces of SPAM® covered in a deliciously light and crispy golden batter." Truly, as Andrew said, the UK is the Hawaii of Europe when it comes to SPAM. God save the Queen!
Mrs Marv is so hardcore that she made sausage, biscuits and gravy for her mom—all of it completely from scratch. Yes, even the sausage! I think you'll agree with me when I say that I think she is a breakfast rock star.
Frankly, I'd be amazed by Gilbey's foolhardiness except that I'm too busy appalled by how ugly that tattoo turned out to be, especially when you consider how pretty the photo of an English breakfast that ran with Graham Holliday's In Defence of British Food feature today is! What do you make of it?
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 23, 2007 at 12:43 PM
I think these breakfast food pillows are adorable (if a little pricey) but I don't know if I can wholeheartedly support a brand with a tagline as heretical as "more fun than the real thing". I'm sorry, but no matter how cute the pillow, the equation will always be fake fried egg < real fried egg. It's what you can actually get in your belly that counts!
We’ve been proudly skipping the most important meal of the day, on a regular basis, for as long as we can remember. Cold cereal isn’t enough to coax anybody out of bed. Oatmeal takes too much time, and instant oatmeal isn’t worth it. Eggs, bacon, pancakes—those weekend brunch staples that invite us to sit down and linger over them—just aren’t practical on most Wednesday mornings. Why not sleep the extra 20 minutes?
Those who do eat breakfast have turned increasingly to the fast-food breakfast sandwich, the granola bar, the doughnut. Some of these options are better than others, but one important quality ties them together: We tend to put our breakfast production into the hands of others.
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 20, 2007 at 8:26 AM
"Join IHOP to celebrate National Pancake Day (also known as Mardi Gras, or Shrove Tuesday) on Tuesday, February 20, 2007. From 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., we’ll give you one free short stack (three) of our famous buttermilk pancakes. All we ask is that you consider making a donation to support local children’s hospitals through Children’s Miracle Network, or other local charities." They raised $340,000 in 2006 and are hoping to hit half a million today, so if you're inclined to eat pancakes and help out, you know what to do!
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 12, 2007 at 1:56 PM
Southern Fried Eggs Benny is kind of like Eggs Benedict, only with a fried egg instead of poached, sausage instead of Canadian bacon, and cream gravy instead of Hollandaise. If your mouth isn't watering by now, I'm not sure we can be friends.
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 7, 2007 at 9:57 AM
The New York Times introduces a new column today: A Good Appetite by Melissa Clark. Its first installment is A Morning Meal Begs to Stay Up Late, exploring polenta's potential as a dinner item (it of course being the first cousin of grits): "It’s a perfect first recipe for this column devoted to foods I’m hankering to eat and proud to feed to anyone willing to pull up a chair ... or a couch. These are foods that are easy to cook and that speak to everyone, either stirring a memory or creating one."
Other highlights:
Marian Burros discovers the unexpected delight of unlaid eggs, which are eggs in varying stages of development that haven't been laid and are harvested from hens sent to slaughter. "[Dan] Barber tried lightly scrambling the eggs with fresh herbs from the greenhouse garden and served them in eggshells. This is what the unlaid egg should taste like: a deep, concentrated flavor, a hint of sweetness, but not overly rich. “You don’t get that in a full egg,” Mr. Barber noted."
Koreans Share Their Secret for Chicken With a Crunch by Julia Moskin: "Korean-style fried chicken is radically different, reflecting an Asian frying technique that renders out the fat in the skin, transforming it into a thin, crackly and almost transparent crust. (Chinese cooks call this “paper fried chicken.”)"
From the New York Times this morning: In the long run, like bagels, “you’re going to have arepas in every store,” predicted [Manuel A.] Miranda, whose innovations include a “toaster-friendly” version (square instead of round), and an experimental Web site that offers online sales nationwide.
Mass-produced toaster arepas? Somewhere, Chowhound founder and arepa aficionado Jim Leff is blowing a gasket.
Posted by Lia Bulaong, January 31, 2007 at 11:30 AM
Buttermilk Pancakes from Marion Cunningham's The Breakfast Book, as adapted by Shuna Fish Lydon. If you've never made pancakes from scratch before, this is the time to learn—this recipe is simple and Shuna's tutorial is both easy to follow and informative: "I like to heat up my oven and keep a plate inside so that I can place the ready pancakes in there to wait, thereby being able to sit down with the person I'm eating pancakes with."
Posted by Adam Roberts, January 9, 2007 at 8:18 AM
Eggs Benedict and Martin Short have very little in common. Eggs Benedict is made with Canadian bacon; Martin Short is hammy and Canadian. One is served on an English muffin with hollandaise sauce, the other co-starred in ¡Three Amigos! And the comparisons end there, except for the fact that Martin Short and eggs Benedict were two looming obstacles in my relationship with Craig, my boyfriend of nine months.
I can't remember precisely when or where it first happened, but my hunch is that we were at Balthazar enjoying one of New York City's best breakfast bargains (eating in a lustrous environment at diner prices). Craig ordered eggs Benedict, and when it came out, he tasted and said, "It's good but not as good as Glo's."
Glo's, he informed me, was a small homey diner in Seattle that served the best eggs Benedict anyone could ever fathom.
Serious Eats made its network television debut on Good Morning America Tuesday morning December 26. I talked about great New Year’s mail-order foods that we think serious eaters would love. But since the nice folks at Good Morning America limited me to four ideas, I thought I would share what else we would recommend if they had just given us another half hour of airtime.
A great New Year's mail-order food lineup should take into account a few factors. People have already made their way through Thanksgiving and Christmas, eating traditional family foods and receiving gifts of foods they really don't want, like fruitcake or bad steaks. The food focus during Thanksgiving and Christmas is on doing what's expected, doing things for other people, and doing what's always been done before.
So New Year's is a time to clear the decks, to indulge yourself and a few loved ones with foods we all love to eat. With our selections, people can stay home, invite a few friends over, and enjoy a great New Year's Eve or New Year's Day meal. Let's face it: A lot of people don't want to go out on New Year's Eve and grapple with drivers who have had too much to drink, restaurants that jack up their prices for the occasion, and sharing the celebration somewhere with unfamiliar faces. In terms of New Year's Day, people like to get up late, eat a big breakfast or brunch, and lounge around the house.
So here are a bunch of great ideas for how to do up New Year's in true Serious Eats style.
Posted by Ed Levine, November 28, 2006 at 12:45 PM
A few weeks ago in the New York Times Arts and Leisure section there was a great piece by Susan Dominus on the Starbucks aesthetic embodied in the CDs and DVDs it sells. That aesthetic, according to both Starbucks executives and customers quoted in the story, is built around the notions of community, inspiration, discovery, and, of course, quality. I'm not ashamed to admit that I buy into this aesthetic. I think the CDs on sale at Starbucks are usually good and interestingly chosen. And I am a music freak. In fact, I wrote about music for ten years before I started writing about food, and I have 2,000 CDs in my collection.
But can you apply these aesthetic values to the food served at Starbucks? Say, to the breakfast sandwiches it now serves at 1,100 Starbucks locations in eight markets? I'm a food guy now, so that's what I want to know.
The first thing you notice when you're waiting in line to order is the stack of breakfast sandwiches in the pastry case right next to the bagels and croissants. These sandwiches are there for display purposes only. There are five on view: sausage, egg, and cheese; pepper bacon, egg, and cheese; sun-dried tomato, ham, egg, and cheese; reduced-fat turkey bacon, egg, and cheese; and eggs Florentine, made with spinach, eggs, and cheese.
When you order one, however, your barista retrieves an already cooked and assembled shrink-wrapped sandwich from a refrigerator and heats and crisps it in a combination microwave-convection oven. Your barista then puts it into a bag and seals it with a sticker that articulates the newfound Starbucks food aesthetic: "Great coffee deserves great food."
Unfortunately there's nothing "great" about the Starbucks breakfast sandwiches. In fact, they are only marginally edible. Egg sandwiches can't even attain "pretty good" status when they're not made fresh to order like they are at hundreds of delis and coffee shops in and around New York City.
I was curious about the genesis of the Starbucks breakfast sandwich. A Starbucks spokesperson explained that the breakfast sandwiches are the product of a lengthy R&D process by a team of "certified" chefs at Starbucks headquarters. These chefs were charged with developing homey breakfast sandwiches using high-quality ingredients that could be heated and served to the customers within the tight real estate confines of a typical Starbucks store. Consistency and high quality were the cornerstones of this initiative.
The chefs knew that no cooking ever takes place in a Starbucks, so that these sandwiches would have to be cooked and assembled in a central location and delivered to each store daily. The breakfast sandwiches, unlike the coffee Starbucks built its business on (made daily before our eyes by remarkably friendly baristas), come from two distribution centers across the country.
Eggs are not made to be cooked in one spot and shipped to another to be eaten. But given the set of constraints these chefs were working within, Starbucks had no choice but to sell heat-and-serve items.
This dooms these breakfast sandwiches. Because what Starbucks ends up serving is a slightly more upscale version of the same scary things we can also buy at 7-Eleven, McDonald's, and every gas station on interstates all across America. These are convenience foods for the latte set (which includes me). Eggs cooked in one place and shipped to another to be served are doomed to slab, loaflike status. In fact, I found the best way to eat a Starbucks breakfast sandwich is to discard the egg loaf slice and eat the rest.
The breakfast sandwiches at Starbucks fly in the face of the often admirable Starbucks aesthetic. Until Starbucks decides to either forgo cooked food or puts kitchens into each store, its food initiative is doomed, no matter how much spinach or fontina cheese or pepper bacon it put in its breakfast sandwiches.
So when you get that hankering for an egg sandwich, head to your local deli, coffee shop, or any place that actually cooks the sandwiches to order. That's a basic food aesthetic all of us can get behind.
Posted by Ed Levine, November 28, 2006 at 12:17 PM
A few weeks ago in the New York Times Arts and Leisure section there was a great piece by Susan Dominus on the Starbucks aesthetic embodied in the CDs and DVDs it sells. That aesthetic, according to both Starbucks executives and customers quoted in the story, is built around the notions of community, inspiration, discovery, and, of course, quality. I'm not ashamed to admit that I buy into this aesthetic. I think the CDs on sale at Starbucks are usually good and interestingly chosen. And I am a music freak. In fact, I wrote about music for ten years before I started writing about food, and I have 2,000 CDs in my collection.
But can you apply these aesthetic values to the food served at Starbucks? Say, to the breakfast sandwiches it now serves at 1,100 Starbucks locations in eight markets? I'm a food guy now, so that's what I want to know.
The first thing you notice when you're waiting in line to order is the stack of breakfast sandwiches in the pastry case right next to the bagels and croissants. These sandwiches are there for display purposes only. There are five on view: sausage, egg, and cheese; pepper bacon, egg, and cheese; sun-dried tomato, ham, egg, and cheese; reduced-fat turkey bacon, egg, and cheese; and eggs Florentine, made with spinach, eggs, and cheese.
When you order one, however, your barista retrieves an already cooked and assembled shrink-wrapped sandwich from a refrigerator and heats and crisps it in a combination microwave-convection oven. Your barista then puts it into a bag and seals it with a sticker that articulates the newfound Starbucks food aesthetic: "Great coffee deserves great food."
Unfortunately there's nothing "great" about the Starbucks breakfast sandwiches. In fact, they are only marginally edible. Egg sandwiches can't even attain "pretty good" status when they're not made fresh to order like they are at hundreds of delis and coffee shops in and around New York City.
I was curious about the genesis of the Starbucks breakfast sandwich. A Starbucks spokesperson explained that the breakfast sandwiches are the product of a lengthy R&D process by a team of "certified" chefs at Starbucks headquarters. These chefs were charged with developing homey breakfast sandwiches using high-quality ingredients that could be heated and served to the customers within the tight real estate confines of a typical Starbucks store. Consistency and high quality were the cornerstones of this initiative.
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