The Editors of Extra Crispy - Breakfast The Most Important Book About the Best Meal of the Day

Breakfast

THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK ABOUT THE BEST MEAL OF THE DAY

THE EDITORS OF

FOREWORD BY

HUGH ACHESON

CONTENTS

WHEN YOU WAKE UP IN THE MORNING, POOH,

WHATS THE FIRST THING YOU SAY TO YOURSELF?

PIGLET

WHATS FOR BREAKFAST?

WHAT DO YOU SAY, PIGLET?

POOH

I SAY, I WONDER WHATS GOING TO HAPPEN EXCITING TODAY?

PIGLET

ITS THE SAME THING.

POOH

A. A. MILNE

FOREWORD

BY HUGH ACHESON

Breakfast is the meal that many of us have lost track of. It has become a ritualized trough of oat bars, GoGurts, caffeine, and maybe an overripe banana. My workday mornings are usually hurried episodes of coffee and cereal, a sustenance function rather than an enjoyable repast. It is a justified adaptation to how we conduct our busy lives, and how convenient it is to just make your body kind of operational. Yet it feels like such a ruinous choice, missing the whole point of eating, which should be soulful and nourishing. Alas, I miss the beauty of the morning meal.

I grew up in a household with too many picky soft scrambled egg enthusiasts, so I do know a fair bit about the breakfast hour. But, I also have a father who balanced that culinary quest for egg custard perfection with bread, not toasted, but obliterated to the darkest hues of burnt. He would eat it without complaint, and still never come clean about whether he really liked it or if he was refusing to atone for his culinary massacres. He also cooked us burnt rice and fish sticks, but not really much in the way of breakfast. I do love him immensely, just not for the food he made us.

Somewhere along the line I, and many more, just gave up and left fantastic breakfasts for restaurant brunches. It was an abandonment of a way of life, cramming our simple breakfasts into Carnation powders, and the more formal ones into long lines at brunches to eat food made by exhausted line cooks working the shift they abhor. And just so you know, brunch is just breakfast and lunch crammed into an XXL shirt that says Is it Mimosa Time?.

Hell, we even leave toast to the professionals now, albeit beautiful toast that is a monument to fresh jammed fruit and whipped ricotta. But it is toast (I am winking at you, Jessica Koslow). It is time to reclaim our breakfast roots. It is time to dutch dutch baby.

With this bookcompiled, tested, and written by morning meal geniusesyou can break the code to beautiful sunrise meals. Get your spatula out, bring those eggs to room temp, crisp some potatoes, make some waffles, and stay in your kitchen. (If you live in NYC you need to empty the oven of the towels and linens you store in the unused device.) It is time to cook. It is time to say no to brunch lines and oat bars. Get the crossword and a pencil, make some beautiful coffee or complex tea, one that tells a story that you can tell me, put on some Archie Shepp, and craft a memorable meal that will change your morning life.

Lets take time to make some real breakfasts of champions.

INTRODUCTION

Heres a thing Ive never told anyone: I want to shrink down to the size of a pea and run around a breakfast buffet. I want to swim in orange juice and spit it into the air like a fountain and catch it in my mouth. I want to lay out on a warm pancake like a seal basking on a beach. Id slowly roll over and lick the pat of butter, and then roll back into basking position. Id tunnel into the pancake like a sugar-crazed badger.

Then Id move on to the meats. Compared to tiny me, each bacon strip would be as tall as a lamppost. Id have to gnaw at them like a cartoon woodchuck attacking a tree, from the bottom up. Id hollow out four sausage patties and place them around my body like tires and roll down a hill of corned beef hash. Thered be sausage links, and Id take two under my arms and jump into a bowl of cereal and use them as floaties. A slice of fried Taylor Ham, curved like a toilet plunger, would be a trampoline, and Id bounce off it and land in a plate of potatoes.

Id stomp into a hash brown, breaking through to its mushy center, which would squish between my toes. Id break off two crispy pieces and strap them to my feet like skis, swoosh down a fork, and launch off its ketchup-slick prongs into a mound of home fries. The bits of green pepper and onion in the home fries would be so greasy theyd escape my grip like slimy fish. Id rest for a moment on a latke.

Next thered be a giant platter of eggs. Id go straight to sunny-side up and sit in the yolk like its a hot tub. Id put on a Denver omelet like a cape. Id strip the delicate white off a poached egg and wear it as a skin suit like Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs . Id look at myself in a reflective can of brown bread and say, Would you eat me? Id eat me.

A fruit salad would be like massive colorful rock formationsa juicy Cappadocia. Id scale strawberries, wedging my feet into their seeds for safety. Id do parkour (or what I imagine parkour to be) along the ridges of sliced apple, cantaloupe, and honeydew. Wait! Pause. What sort of sadistic cheapskate loaded my fantasy fruit salad with lowly honeydew? Moving on...

Generously buttered toast would tower over me like a brownstone. Id run into a warm black currant scone linebacker-style and come out the other end with gooey currant stuck to my hands and face. There would be muffins, and croissants, and kouign-amann, and Danish, and babka, and doughnuts, and bagels, and rugelach, and morning buns, and mini rhubarb galettes that are still big compared to me, and regular-size rhubarb galettes for me to run around in like baseball fields.

OK, thats about it. Thanks for reading all that. This being a breakfast book, its one of the few places I could share it. Why do I have this fantasy? Probably because Im the editor of the breakfast site Extra Crispy. I frequently have breakfast on the brain in a professional capacity, and it has worked its way into my psyche in strange ways. For over two years weve been publishing a wide variety of essays, recipes, and videos that celebrate the morning meal. This book is comprised of stories and recipes, along with original photographs and other new work by our brilliant, breakfast-obsessed contributors. Call it a whimsical breakfast jamboree. Or if youre feeling literal, call it a breakfast cookbook with essays. Keep it on your coffee table, or in your breakfast nook. And if you dont have a breakfast nook, call your contractor right now and demand one. Even if you live in a tiny apartment and if you were to add a breakfast nook your entire house would basically be the nook, get that nook. This book is absolutely nook-worthy! Happy breakfasting!

RYAN GRIM, EDITOR, EXTRA CRISPY

CHAPTER ONE

BUILDING BLOCKS OF BREAKFAST