Breakfast
1324 recipes found
Poppy, Lemon and Sunflower Seed Pancakes
These are inspired by Heidi Swanson’s poppy seed and sunflower seed pancakes. She serves hers with a citrus marmalade, and also suggests making a savory version and serving it with a compound butter (I’d go Mediterranean and serve the savory ones with Greek-style yogurt). I decided to stir some lemon zest into the batter. I dotted some of the pancakes with raspberries and left others plain. Loved them both ways.
Apple Cider Doughnuts
Todd Gray, the chef and owner of the Equinox Restaurant in Washington, developed these apple cider sufganiyot as a nod to his wife's Jewish heritage (he's Episcopalian), serving them with blueberry-ginger jam at his restaurant during Hanukkah. We like to throw a batch together anytime we crave the taste of autumn.
Buttermilk Cake Doughnuts
Making doughnuts at home might seem like a dream, but it’s an attainable dream. Golden brown on the outside with a tender, cake-like crumb inside, these classic cake-style doughnuts rely on buttermilk and baking powder for their lift and rise. The dough is slightly sticky, but resist the urge to over-flour and over-knead. Like working with biscuits, the dough must be handled delicately or the doughnuts will have difficulty rising as they fry, becoming tough and dense. Be sure to use a thermometer to determine the temperature of oil – too hot and the doughnuts get too dark before cooking all the way through; not hot enough, they’ll be greasy without that signature rise. These versatile cake doughnuts can be glazed, dusted in powdered sugar or tossed to coat in cinnamon sugar, but are their absolute best soon after they’re fried.
Doughnuts
Homemade doughnuts are a bit of a project, but they’re less work than you might think, and the result is a truly great, hot, crisp doughnut. Once you’ve mastered this basic recipe for a fluffy, yeasted doughnut, you can do pretty much anything you like in terms of glazes, toppings and fillings.
Boston Cream Doughnuts
This is a recipe for a popular riff on the classic Boston Cream Pie, with a crisp, flaky doughnut as the vessel for silky pastry cream. The only specialty tool you’ll need is a pastry bag. But you can also poke a funnel into the side of the doughnut and spoon the cream into the center of the pastry.
Jelly Doughnuts
Where doughnut shops tend to rely on fluorescent red, sickly sweet jelly, you are free to use jelly (or jam, or marmalade, or whatever you like) that actually tastes good. The only specialty tool you’ll need is a pastry bag. But you can also poke a funnel into the side of the doughnut and spoon the jelly into the center of the pastry.
Gluten-Free Banana Chocolate Muffins
These dark chocolate muffins taste more extravagant than they are. Cacao — raw chocolate — is considered by many to be a “super food.” It’s high in antioxidants and an excellent source of magnesium, iron, chromium, manganese, zinc, and copper. It is also a good source of omega-6 fatty acids and vitamin C.
Fruit, Poached and Marinated
Fruit compotes make great compromise desserts; they’re sweet, but not as sweet as sorbets, and like sorbets they don’t require flour, butter or pastry skills. I didn’t develop any kind of knack for pastry until I began collaborating with pastry chefs on their cookbooks, but for years I managed to round out my dinner parties with fruit-based desserts(though the children of my friend Clifford Wright used to roll their eyes when I brought dessert – “She doesn’t bring dessert, she brings fruit,” they’d say). I revisited some of those desserts this week, particularly various fruits poached in wine, and I still find them delightful. I find that I’m sometimes negligent about eating fruit in the colder months, but not when I have some wine-poached pears, bananas or prunes in the refrigerator. I am as likely to stir the fruit, with its luscious syrup, into my morning yogurt as to eat it for dessert, andthe compotes are good keepers. Early spring is an in-between time for fruit. Stone fruits aren’t ready yet and it’s not really apple, pear or citrus season either, though all of those fall-winter fruits are still available. I poached pears in red wine and bananas in white wine, and used dried fruits for two of my compotes, prunes poached in red wine and a dried-fruit compote to which I also added a fresh apple and pear. For the last compote of the week I combined blood oranges and pink grapefruit in arefreshing citrus-caramel syrup, and topped the fruit with pomegranate seeds. Even if my friend’s kids wouldn’t agree, this was definitely dessert. Bananas Poached in Vanilla-Scented Chardonnay Summary:Don’t overcook the bananas in this easy dish, and you’ll be rewarded with a fragrant, delicious dessert. I am usually not one forbananas in desserts, but this, if you’re careful not to overcook the bananas, is heavenly. Years ago, in the early days of my career as a vegetarian caterer, I made it often; it was one of my most requested desserts. These days I’m as likely to spoon some of the bananas with their fragrant syrup into a bowl of morning yogurt as I am to serve it after a meal.
Seedy Cake
A men’s tea party seemed like a fantasy. But as the snow melted, these boys were happy to gather at Nightwood’s woodworking studio near the Brooklyn Navy Yard for strong, earthy teas and late-afternoon snacks.
The Most Adaptable One-Bowl Cornmeal Poundcake
Is it cake time yet? Cake is comforting in a way that a tart or cookies are not, and this is especially true of loaf cakes, which you can convince yourself is just like bread. Slices of it fit in the toaster, so really, what’s the difference? This citrus-scented cornmeal number is endlessly adaptable — use whatever fat you have on hand, dairy or light, bright flavoring you have on hand — and requires just one bowl. It’s wonderful in slices, but extra nice toasted and buttered for breakfast.
Mushrooms on Toast
Beloved by British and other Anglophone cooks, mushrooms on toast is a hearty savory dish that can be made quickly. It’s cheap and delicious if you use ordinary cultivated mushrooms, and suitable for any time of day: breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner or late snack. One pound of mushrooms is just right for two servings.
Butterscotch-Glazed Cinnamon Rolls
Cinnamon rolls get the grown-up treatment here, with muscular brown sugar used in place of white, and a splash of bourbon in the glaze for bite. The flavor is heavenly, the smell ambrosial — and the recipe is large enough that, if you're not feeding a crowd, you can freeze a few for later in the week.
Sun-Dried Tomato and Goat Cheese Omelet
Sometimes the filling for my omelet is determined by something I find in my pantry. I don’t recall what led me to buy the jar of sun-dried tomatoes that went into this one, but they were very much at home in an omelet.
Morning Bread Pudding
This special occasion breakfast dish is like a cross between a tarte Tatin and a moist, delicate bread pudding. You have to plan ahead – it needs to sit in the refrigerator overnight – and it requires the preparation of a simple caramel sauce, but it's absolutely, 100% worth the effort. Once the sauce is done, swirl it around the bottom of a pie pan, fill it with slices of challah, then saturate it with a slurry of eggs, sugar, mascarpone cheese, milk and a dash of almond extract. Let it rest overnight, bake and invert on a platter. Serve with a dollop of mascarpone or fromage blanc to cut the sweetness.
Grits Rancheras
Anson Mills pencil cob grits make a great stand-in here for the corn tortillas that traditionally constitute the base for huevos rancheras. The salsa and the egg yolk ooze into the creamy grits, an unforgettable match made in heaven. Since you are working with the highest quality grits here it would be a shame to pair them with ordinary battery eggs; go out and get the best farm-raised eggs you can afford and just see what a difference that ultra-yellow yolk makes. You can make the salsa while the grits are cooking or you can make it before you begin cooking them and keep it warm. You can also use a commercial salsa ranchera, as long as it is a good one. Note that the grits need an overnight soak before cooking.
French Toasted Apricot Brioche
Buckwheat Crepes With Roasted Apricots
Apricots are delicious in both sweet and savory dishes. The flavor will deepen with cooking. Roasting apricots intensifies the flavor, and the apricots give up some delicious juice. It blends with the small amount of butter and honey here, and you can use it as a sauce. This dish offers a combination of earthy/nutty from the crepes and sweet and tangy from the apricots.
Crepes With Raspberry-Cassis Sauce
These sophisticated crepes can be made ahead of time and reheated in a low-temperature oven. The sauce, made by simmering raspberries in a rose-scented, cassis-spiked syrup, is what makes them special. While most of it is poured over the folded crepes, a bit is added to the yogurt, honey and lime filling, making it just sweet enough.
Amaranth Porridge With Grated Apples and Maple Syrup
Amaranth is a tiny seed – it isn’t really a grain, though that is how we treat it – and has both sweet and grassy overtones. I experimented with preparing it as a polenta, like the teff polenta I made earlier in the week, and seasoning it with nut oil or mixing in a little Parmesan. It worked that way, but I still found that the flavor of this food works better with sweet flavors, and the texture did not benefit from the long oven simmer, the way the teff did. So again, I decided that amaranth is best served as a breakfast porridge. I toasted the seeds in the pan before adding water, and this added a wonderful popcorn dimension to the flavor. The aroma of this cereal as it cooked reminded me of the smell of the whole wheat Ralston Hot Cereal that my mother used to make for me. The amaranth will cook in about 20 minutes on top of the stove. I add milk halfway through the cooking, and the amaranth retains a nice grainy texture.
Kasha
For years I have had uneven results with buckwheat groats, or kasha, as the dry-roasted grains are called. I have tried different methods, both stovetop and oven, and usually mixed the grains with an egg before cooking. Sometimes my grains cooked up to a mush, other times they held their shape but still seemed rather soft and indistinct. I sort of gave up on kasha for a while, opting for more predictable grains and pseudo-grains like quinoa and spelt. But I love the flavor of buckwheat, so this week I took another stab at buckwheat groats with a box of medium-grain kasha I bought at the supermarket – and everything changed. These grains were cracked, like bulgur, something I hadn’t seen before. I followed the directions on the box, and they turned out perfect -- dry and fluffy, with the wonderful nutty/earthy buckwheat flavor I find so appealing. To see if it was the cut of the grain only or the combination of the cut of the grain and the cooking method that gave me such good results, I used the exact same cooking method using whole toasted buckwheat groats. The whole groats turned out better than any I had made before, but they took three times as long to cook than the cracked groats, yielded a little less, and because all of the egg is not absorbed by the whole grains the way it is by the cracked grains, which have more cut surfaces to absorb the egg, you get some egg flakes floating on the top of the cooked kasha, which is not very attractive (though it’s easy to remove them).
Frittata With Peas, Herbs and Feta or Parmesan
This frittata is just one good reason to stock peas in your freezer. My favorite herbs to use are tarragon and chives.
Egg White Frittata With Leeks
Finnish Pancakes
Outside Thunder Bay, you won’t find many places that serve the Hoito’s style of Finnish pancakes, which bear no resemblance to fluffy American-style pancakes. At the restaurant, they are each the size of a dinner plate, heavy and dense.
Peter Reinhart’s Whole Wheat Bagels
When I order a whole wheat bagel in a coffee shop what I get is a white bagel with a little bit of whole wheat flour thrown in. These bagels are different; they are truly whole grain. I’ve been enthralled lately with Peter Reinhart’s new cookbook, Bread Revolution. Reinhart, a baking teacher and cookbook author whom I have long admired, has discovered the magic of sprouted whole grain flours, which he uses in the recipes in this book (you can get sprouted whole wheat flour in whole foods stores and from several online sources). He also illuminates many of the mysteries of baking with whole grain flours in general. The recipes that I have tried work with regular whole wheat flour as well; I have Community Grains whole wheat flour on hand but did not have sprouted whole wheat flour when I was developing this week’s Recipes for Health, so that is what I used. One of the important things I learned – relearned really – from Peter is that when you make dough with whole wheat flour, which absorbs liquid more readily than white flour, it is important to give the dough a little time to absorb the water so that it will be workable. So there is a rest after you add the liquid to the flour; you’ll think the dough is going to be way too wet, then it miraculously firms up, in very little time. Reinhart has two methods for bagels in his cookbook; one requires an overnight rest in the refrigerator after shaping (that is the method I have used in the past), the other, made with sprouted wheat flour, can be boiled and baked after rising and shaping. If you use sprouted whole wheat flour Reinhart says the overnight rise isn’t required because the sprouted wheat allows the bagels to develop optimum flavor in a shorter time. I couldn’t discern much of a difference between the flavor of my overnight regular whole wheat bagels and those I made with the shorter rise; and the ones I made with the shorter rise were prettier. Barley malt is the traditional sweetener used in bagel dough and in the water bath, but either honey or agave syrup can be substituted.