You Asked for Breakfast Salads. Luckily, All Salads Are Breakfast Salads.
Nonetheless, we have two dishes that really fit the bill, from a favorite new cookbook released last fall.
SALAD, LIKE TIME, IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT—a fact we’ve been mulling over in the Department of Salad for over four years now, hoping to help free our favorite dish from the limitations imposed upon it by the human mind.
But it is so often the nature of our species to reduce beautiful, complex things to their simplest terms in order to understand them. In order not to be dazzled to death by their splendor. So salad is not alone in this situation. And it’s not just dishes that endure such dispassionate pigeonholing. It happens to meals, too.
Especially breakfast, which persists despite our desire to pin our insecurities about optimal nutrition and longevity upon it while we continue eating whatever the hell we want when we wake up.
In modern times, more responsibility for the health of the world has been heaped upon the shoulders of breakfast than on any other meal. Just about anyone will tell you, with an air of blithe authority, that it is the most important meal of the day. Even though many of them have gotten this information from a talking cartoon tiger selling frosted corn flakes or a magical leprechaun selling God knows what.
So the question is: Says who, and why? The answer has changed drastically, according to a very interesting Atlantic Monthly piece, The Most Contentious Meal of the Day. The writer Megan Garber notes that breakfast, once shunned as a moral lapse and reflection of weak will, “ has been subject to roughly the same influences that any other fickle food fashions will be: social virality, religious dogmas, economic cycles, new scientific discoveries about the truth or falsity of the old saying ‘you are what you eat.’ And all that has meant that the meal associated with the various intimacies of the morning hours has transformed, fairly drastically, over the centuries.”
So while breakfast has been around as long as man has gotten out of bed in the morning, its tangled history and the bossy dictates we’ve attached to it have come to resemble the dining hall at a clown college more than they have an empirically based medical establishment. Especially, it seems, here in the United States.
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One minute, breakfast can’t be anything but bacon and eggs and toast and orange juice! Or yogurt, fruit, and granola. But it could also be nondescript white porridge, couldn’t it? Or waffles and syrup? It is definitely smoothies, chock-full of nutritious green stuff and protein powder. A sausage-egg biscuit with cheese will certainly start your engine.
But whatever breakfast may be, you’ll be labelled a bad parent if you don’t get your kids to eat it. And sometimes the best chance of that happening means offering them a bowl of cookie chunks or sugar puffs or frosted wheat swimming in milk. (After you drive them to school full of breakfast, you can stop and get a caramel macchiatolattechino with whipped cream and a cherry for yourself.)
I bring all of this up because many of the same people who will happily consume most any of the dishes I mentioned above as their morning meal will display the universal expression of disgust if you tell them you regularly eat salad for breakfast.
The Department of Salad crowd is different, though, even if some of us (meaning me) do love an occasional trip to Waffle House or a handful of Corn Pops if they present themselves to us. But I didn’t realize just how different until I began reading your responses to our recent private subscriber chat, which included requests for breakfast salads. (This is why I love you; plus, I got so many terrific ideas for upcoming issues, and I’m enjoying slowly but surely responding to them all.)
We’ve gotten the breakfast-salad request here at the Department of Salad before. But I’m not sure I’ve taken it as seriously as I should have, possibly because we have published plenty of breakfast-suitable salads without labeling them as such—the most obvious of which is the Salad with Poached Eggs & Bacon Vinaigrette from Food Network star Andrew Zimmern, featured in the issue below (I’ll do a full breakfast-appropriate roundup later):
And even this time around, when I said to myself, I have tons of ideas for that category!, I quickly realized that all of my breakfast-salad ideas are . . . the same salads I make for lunch and dinner. Which is how I then went spinning off in the direction of: What does breakfast even mean? (And also: Why are we here? What is man’s purpose? But that’s really not relevant here.) All of which is how we got to this particular newsletter. And while I know that we are not in the breakfast business, this is my way of telling you that I agree with you that salad for breakfast is a great idea—and that we plan to take it more seriously.
I have to admit that I might not have run with the idea so quickly had I not just bought Sunlight & Breadcrumbs, the newest cookbook by the much-loved Seattle chef Renee Erickson, which is just a really lovely collection of recipes and writing dedicated to creative home cooking, which also features Erickson’s art and photography (she’s an art-school graduate). I highly recommend it. (Erickson is James Beard award winner, but if there were also an award for restaurant names, her Seattle restaurant empire would definitely win.)
In Sunlight & Breadcrumbs, Erickson does not classify the two salads I have for you today as breakfast, lunch, or dinner; they simply fall under a chapter heading titled “Vegetables Are Remarkable”—and that’s really all I’d say about them, too.
Although I would like to note that for the first salad, I had to substitute regular radicchio for the Castelfranco, which I couldn’t find. When I was buying it, I tried to locate heads with looser leaves than usual, to more closely replicate the qualities of Castelfranco. It worked beautifully. This dish takes about zero minutes to make and is just out of this world. I’ve made it 5 times now.
And I’d like to encourage those of you who never thought you’d eat salad for breakfast to use these dishes as an opportunity to break out of that prison.
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*RECIPE: Roasted Castelfranco with Soft Scrambled Eggs, Parmigiano, and Balsamic Vinegar, from Sunlight & Breadcrumbs, by Renee Erickson
Serves 2
CHEF RENEE ERICKSON’S NOTE: I am so smitten with the spectrum of chicories —Italian bitter green and cream and red leafy vegetables—that I can now find in Seattle from late summer until early spring. This dish, made with the gorgeously speckled radicchio variety Castelfranco, is the perfect dinner night in with your sweetheart. If you can’t get Castelfranco, radicchio, Treviso, or a smallish escarole is a good substitute. The bitterness of the leaves is cushioned by the soft luxury of the eggs and a kiss of sweet-tart balsamic vinegar. (A request: Please spend some good money on your balsamic—you don't need to get extravagant condiment grade but invest enough to get barrel-aged vinegar—it will last nearly forever in the fridge and you only need a bit at a time. Typical grocery store balsamic is too thin and sour and lacks the resonance of traditional balsamic.) The dish comes together quickly after you add the eggs, so have your serving plates warm and your guests in the room and ready to eat. Serve with a plate of prosciutto di Parma and pretend you are in Parma, Italy.
1 Castelfranco radicchio, about 7 ounces
4 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 large eggs, whisked and seasoned with salt and pepper
½ cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
Excellent-quality balsamic vinegar (I like Chiarli)
Before cooking, cut each Castelfranco in half top to bottom and then again to make 4 quarters. Trim away three-quarters of the thick core in the middle of each Castelfranco wedge. It will cook more evenly this way. You’re looking for wedges no more than 1 inch thick, so bigger chicories may need to be cut more.
Heat 1 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large steel pan over medium heat. When shimmering, place the cut Castelfranco wedges cut side down in the pan, leaving a couple of inches between each piece (depending on the size of the pan, you may need to work in two batches). After about 2 minutes, flip each wedge and season with a bit of salt and pepper. Cook for another 2 minutes, removing any single leaves as they look done; it is nice to get a bit of browning on the wedges. Remove the wedges to a nearby plate and set aside.
Add the remaining 2 tablespoons olive oil to the pan and increase the heat to medium-high. Stir half of the cheese into the seasoned eggs. When the oil is shimmering, pour in the eggs; they will cook quickly so be ready! As soon as the eggs set a bit, give them a quick scramble with a spatula, then add the cooked chicories. Fold the mixture once, then turn the heat off.
At this point you can remove it or leave it in the pan to cook with the residual heat until the eggs are set to your preference—I like my scrambles soft. Plate with the rest of the cheese, a bit more black pepper, and a generous drizzle of fancy balsamic vinegar. Eat right away.
*RECIPE: Lettuces with Soft-Boiled Egg, Toasted Pecans, and Tahini-Tarragon Dressing, from Sunlight & Breadcrumbs, by Renee Erickson
Serves 4 to 6
CHEF RENEE ERICKSON’S NOTE: My friend Carrie’s beautiful giant purple lettuces were so full and lush they looked like huge peonies. I designed a salad around them that is a satisfying dinner—eggs, nuts, radishes, and a richer dressing. All it needed was wine and good bread, enough for a meal. Any leftover dressing is great to dip bread into or for a salad the next day.
6 large eggs
½ cup tahini (I like Villa Jerada brand)
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 clove garlic, peeled
½ cup plain, whole-milk yogurt
3 tablespoons lemon juice
1 cup picked loosely packed tarragon leaves
½ teaspoon honey
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 large butter or bibb lettuce (about 1 ¾ pounds), leaves separated
6 radishes, sliced into very thin coins with a mandoline
1 cup toasted pecans
Have a big bowl of ice water prepared. Bring a 3- to 4-quart pot of water to boil over high heat. Gently lower the eggs into the water and turn down the heat to maintain a gentle simmer. Cook for 6 ½ minutes, then remove the eggs directly to the ice bath. Peel as soon as they are cool enough to handle. The eggs could be cooked the day before you want to make the salad.
Prepare the dressing: In a blender, combine the tahini, olive oil, garlic, yogurt, lemon juice, tarragon, and honey. Blend until very smooth and creamy. Thin with a little bit of water if needed and season well with salt and pepper.
Layer the lettuce on a deep platter, followed by the eggs, radishes, a liberal amount of the dressing (you should have about ½ cup left over), then the pecans, and serve. Store the leftover dressing in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 3 days.
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🥬 🥬🥬 🥬That’s It! We’re done here! We’ll see you soon with a recipe for authentic Norwegian Multekrem (Cloudberry Cream). I’m kidding—it’s going to be salad.
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As an occasional intermittent faster, I have very much come to believe that any food is “breakfast” food … no matter the time of day, I’m breaking my fast! I also have a friend who doesn’t like sweets or traditional breakfast foods - she frequently has a ham sandwich first thing in the morning. So all that to say - who cares what we eat and what time we eat it? Good food can be enjoyed at any time! These recipes look great.
My favorite breakfast salad is the classic Salad Lyonnaise: frisee, thick lardons, and a poached egg. Sometimes also with fried potato cubes, because that's how a certain defunct restaurant in SF used to serve it for extra heft. Accompanied by some very strong tea, please.
And hey. If we can eat breakfast foods any time of the day, why can't we eat lunch and dinner food for breakfast, salad inclusive? My kid had a bowl of chili for breakfast today. I usually have a PB&J. The only real issue is that sometimes my digestion is delicate in the morning, but frankly that precludes a big swath of traditional American breakfast foods, too.