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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Marilyn Marter of the Philadelphia Inquirer says we might be in the middle of "a full-fledged breakfast war", with 
infraredherring made the 
Apartment Therapy: The Kitchen 
