Breakfast and Brunch: 76 Recipes for Eggs, Bread, Butter and Everything Until Lunch, Made With Real Ingredients (The Pub Kitchen)

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Written by a chef whose job was the breakfast pass, every morning, for three and a half years.Twenty past five, the dining room still black, six pans coming up to heat. Bacon laid flat so it does not curl. Poaching water pulled back so it barely trembles. Hollandaise made in the gap between the last prep job and the first order, because it cannot be made early and it cannot be made late.That is the shift this book came out of.Breakfast is the honest service. No long braise doing the work for you. No sauce covering anything. An egg on a plate is an egg on a plate. It is either right or it is not, and everybody eating it has a fixed idea of what right means, because they have eaten it ten thousand times before.And here is the part that matters: the reason yours have not been right is almost never you.The pan was not hot enough. The eggs went in cold. The scrambled eggs were cooked until they looked done, which is always about twenty seconds too far. The poaching water was boiling. Nobody wrote down the order things had to happen in, so five things finished at five different times.Not one of those is a talent problem. They are heat problems and timing problems, and a book can fix those in an afternoon.What is inside76 recipes, most of them plates he actually sent, for money, to people who would have sent them back.The egg, properly. Fried four ways, both schools of scrambled, poached with no vinegar and no whirlpool, boiled to the minute, and two kinds of omelette.Ten eggs Benedict, and a hollandaise that does not split, with the fix for when it does and a ninety-second blender method. Ham hock, hot-smoked salmon, sardine, bacon, chorizo with its own paprika oil, black pudding, crab, and a Thai version with lime leaf and chilli.Bread, and the truth about it. An everyday loaf with no starter and no machine, ciabatta, Turkish bread, English muffins, crumpets with real holes. Plus what is actually in a supermarket loaf, and an honest chapter on gluten.Make your own butter in fifteen minutes. Cultured or sweet, plus ghee, labneh, creme fraiche, and a straight chapter on raw milk that gives you the law, the evidence on both sides, and the real risks.The Thai food he cooked first, because he learned in his own restaurant in Thailand before he ever worked a pub pass. Pad krapow moo with a crisp-edged fried egg, kai jiao, jok, som tam done the way it is actually made.Sauces, relishes, jam and marmalade, all from scratch, because the ingredient rule in this book does not survive a bacon sandwich otherwise.How to get six breakfasts hot on the table at once, which is the part nobody teaches.Fifteen troubleshooting entries, each titled with the symptom as you would say it out loud, plus a long FAQ and the reference charts. Nothing in this book comes out of a packetNo seed oils. No margarine, no stock cubes, no bottled hollandaise, no shop pancake mix, no bottled ketchup or brown sauce, because those get made. Butter, lard, dripping, ghee, olive oil, dry-cured bacon, butcher sausages, flour, water, salt and yeast.Metric first with imperial in brackets. Gas marks on every temperature. Salt always given as a weight, because a spoonful of one salt is not a spoonful of another. Internal temperatures are pull-from-heat, not serving temperatures, so carryover is never counted twice.Nearly sixty photographs, and every one is of the dish it belongs to.From the author of The Roast of the Day, the other half of the same working day. Read more