Rethinking breakfast: beyond bacon and eggs

There’s toast. There’s eggs. There’s bacon. But there is also a long list of breakfast dishes that seem to have been lifted straight from an international five-star hotel or a business class airline menu. Breakfast culture has come a long way.

Morning meal service is big business in Australia, worth a staggering $10 billion each year. Research has shown that the cooked breakfast is something Australians are likely to travel for and spend money on, with only 10% of us choosing to eat a cooked breakfast at home. As a nation, we have developed a dine-out brunch and breakfast culture, and those operators who know how to capitalise are cashing in.

This love affair with breakfast is relatively new, beginning about a generation ago in the inner-city suburbs of Melbourne’s Fitzroy and Sydney’s Newtown. Young urban professionals (YUPPIES) moved into these old suburbs and sought ways to socialise on Saturday mornings, often after a big Friday night. Establishments such as Black Cat Café on Brunswick Street (run by jazz singer
Henry Maaz) began to define a new breakfast culture.

It was in the hip new places where eggs were scrambled and poached by the box, whipped into omelettes and adorned with bacon and slow-roast tomatoes. Customers soon became so familiar with this format that they would often order without looking at the menu, usually starting with two eggs on toast. Bacon and eggs were the ‘Breakfast Don’, and cafés in the early days were expected to deliver all the accoutrements – baked beans, spinach, tomato and mushrooms. It was more about giving people what they wanted and less about demonstrating culinary creativity.

But as customers matured, so did their tastes. While the full ‘cooked English’ remained the dominant choice for diners, things began to go rogue in the late noughties. Sliced white bread was replaced with thick, crusty sourdough. Fringe dwellers began offering exotic ingredients like halloumi, smoked salmon, black pudding and hollandaise. Then avocado! And the customers lapped it up. In this feedback loop of inventive chefs – who were influenced by global culture as much as Western tradition – a new paradigm of breakfast culture emerged.

For many operators the breakfast business is still based around fast food takeaways like egg and bacon rolls or toasted sandwiches. Yet, with dishes like eggs Benedict and French toast having morphed from special occasion dishes to everyday fare, savvy consumers are now looking for more from their morning meal. Coffee is now being upsold like fine restaurant wine, and highly trained chefs are constructing haute cuisine morning meals. While there is little doubt that bacon and eggs are still the reigning monarchs of the Western morning meal, we are seeing dishes like breakfast pizza, morning variations of Japanese katsu and even playful renditions of the classic carbonara.

Savoury, protein-rich breakfasts are nothing new. For centuries, breakfast was a meal of leftovers from the previous night’s dinner, often mashed together and cooked with an egg. Preserved meats like bacon and ham, which could sit in the larder without spoiling, provided the fat for frying. And the hens, which generally lay in the morning, gave us the eggs.

Late in the Industrial Revolution, in America’s grain belt, health and religion converged, leading to the processing of corn and wheat into what we now know as cereals. These were made by businesses often owned by religious groups. These novel foods, cooked and pressed into flakes and other shapes, were marketed as breakfast foods that were good for the body and the soul. They were promoted around the Western world, often at the expense of bacon consumption.

After World War II, bacon consumption plummeted, especially in the US, but producers hit back with a clever marketing campaign backed by endorsements from over 5,000 doctors. The campaign promoted bacon and eggs as traditional breakfast fare and asserted that the day was ‘not complete’ without a hearty breakfast. This campaign cemented the dominance of bacon as a breakfast staple, not just in the USA but also in Australia. While cereals never went away, a hot breakfast just wasn’t complete without bacon and eggs.

It’s well known that Australian chefs and cooks love to borrow from other cultures – Australian cuisine is a mixture of global influences. So, while bacon may reign in the Western world, breakfasts from many other global culinary traditions are influencing chefs, cooks and restaurateurs, thus redefining the morning meal once again.

The Venezuelan dish of arepas, for example, is gaining a foothold on the Australian breakfast plate. These thick, unleavened cornbreads are served with coffee and hot dipping chocolate or spicy chorizo and salsa. Meanwhile, from Mexico come chilaquiles. This delicious dish features fried tortilla pieces slathered in green chilli or tomato salsa, topped with Oaxaca cheese and cream. Imagine soft, well-sauced nachos served with plenty of coriander – the Mexican herb epazote. Traditionally enjoyed with juiced greens and black coffee, Down Under, they go well with a bloody Mary and a macchiato.

Aussie chefs fresh from a trip to Rio are serving up the Brazilian classic of pão de queijo – a cheese bread made with cassava flour and fresh cheese. Crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside, it’s light enough to be served with fruit jam and fresh papaya or filled with more fresh cheese and drizzled with honey.

Nasi goreng is a beloved breakfast staple and the national dish of Indonesia. Translating to ‘fried rice’, it consists of cooked and chilled rice, fried in oil with garlic, ginger, chilli and shallots, dressed with kecap manis and served with a fried egg. It is often accompanied by protein options like prawns or chicken, which can be added as extras, especially in establishments where clients are watching their costs.

Another Southeast Asian breakfast dish making its way onto our menus is roti canai. Hailing from Malaysia and Singapore, this dish was brought to the Asian peninsula by Indian labourers. These crispy yet chewy, multi-layered flatbreads are cooked in ghee, giving them a rich, buttery flavour. Usually accompanied by a curry sauce, they can also be served with fresh banana and condensed milk or filled with an egg and served with spicy condiments in a dish known as roti telur. Another variation is roti sardine, where the bread is stuffed with canned sardines, sliced onions, chillies and beaten eggs, then dipped into a spicy sambal.

Jianbing is common in China. From the port city of Tianjin in the northeast comes this warm breakfast pancake, often made with mung or black bean flour. Spread on a hot griddle with a wooden paddle, they’re filled with egg, spring onions, mustard pickles, shallots, coriander and sometimes chicken or lap cheong, and then served with fermented bean paste, chilli sauce and hoisin.

While we are more familiar with European breakfasts, creative chefs are introducing some unusual endemic European specialities. From the ancient island of Crete comes a bread-like pie in which mizithra, a soft white whey cheese similar to ricotta, is kneaded with layers of thin, unleavened dough and mixed with a shot of Cretan tsikoudia (almost identical to Greek raki). The dough is rolled flat and fried until golden and crisp. While in Crete, it can be enjoyed with a shot of tsikoudia, it is more likely to be washed down here with a caffé latte, with fruit and yoghurt on the side.

Another Mediterranean speciality served up down under comes from Italy’s sunny Sicily. On a warm summer morning, it is not unusual to find people enjoying a freshly baked brioche bun filled with a scoop of ice-cold gelato, topped with a snow-like layer of icing sugar. This is ‘brioche con gelato’. Dishes like these add colour, flavour and excitement to the Australian morning meal service.

Yianni Passaris, one of Brisbane’s pioneering breakfast restaurateurs, understands tradition but has refined it to deliver some of the most delicious and creative offerings in town. “I wanted to elevate breakfast in Brisbane,” says Yianni, speaking passionately about his project. “I come from an Italian fine dining background and wanted to offer customers a better, more focused dining experience. There’s no reason why breakfast and brunch have to be the same old thing over and over.”

Celebrating nine years since he opened the doors of his West End breakfast restaurant, Morning After, Yianni explains the motivation behind their menu. “Food is as much about storytelling and emotion as it is about flavour and sustenance,” he says. “When I was young, Dad used to treat me to a Sausage McMuffin at Macca’s after I played Saturday morning soccer. I loved that experience so much that I’ve paid homage to it with our MaMuffin.” This breakfast bestseller features finely ground Wagyu beef and pork sausage nestled on a rich, folded omelette with a double layer of melting cheese, the crunch of a golden hash brown, and a generous drizzle of ranch dressing – all sandwiched between a toasted, freshly baked English muffin.

The menu at Morning After boasts 14 dishes, with favourites including deep-fried croquettes filled with leek, mushrooms and truffle béchamel. More commonly thought of as tapas or canapés, when a fried egg, a puck of golden halloumi, globes of roasted cherry tomatoes and a dollop of truffle-infused honey are added, the result is fine dining technique and quality served in the early morning. While grounded in tradition and finely attuned to the demands of the modern brunch consumer, this is breakfast beyond bacon and eggs.

Another of Yianni’s blockbuster brekkie dishes is simply called ‘Carbonara’. “It has all the components of a traditional breakfast,” says Yianni. “It has toast, in the form of crunchy herbed pangrattato. There’s plenty of smoked bacon and even a 63-degree egg. There’s cream and grano padano cheese, but we’ve added kale and mushrooms to give it more of a breakfast twist.” Instead of using spaghetti, the traditional pasta for carbonara, he uses malloreddus, sometimes called gnocchetti sardi. “We didn’t want to confuse people into thinking they were getting potato gnocchi,” explains Yianni, “so we used the pasta’s less common name to manage expectations.”

The team at Morning After has managed the brunch drinks conundrum, where most breakfast diners eschew alcoholic beverages for juice or coffee. “We emphasise coffee culture here,” he says. “We have rotating single origins, feature blends and our house blend.” Instead of just offering an espresso or a flat white, the wait staff upsell customers to a ‘one and one’. This allows customers to try the same coffee in different styles. An espresso shot could come from one side of the portafilter, with the other side used to make a caffé latte. Guests are served both styles for a small extra cost. “It really engages people; they get more into coffee and often order another round,” says Yianni. “Good coffee complements good food.”

“We start with great produce and the best ingredients,” says Yianni. “Then we have a team of chefs who have the skill and training to consistently deliver the quality of food we’re known for. What we do here is more than brunch or breakfast; it’s à la carte dining, just a little earlier in the day.”