Have you had breakfast yet today? Did you maybe quickly throw something together that left you not feeling particularly fulfilled about what you just put down your throat?
Now?
If the answer is yes, then you need to listen to what top Melbourne chef and restaurant owner Ben Shuri has to say about breakfast. Ben owns and works at the Three Handed restaurant Attica and says it takes just as long to make a bad breakfast as it does to make a good one. So what are Ben's top tips for making a great breakfast. My name is doctor
Amantha Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work a show about how to help you do your best work.
On today is my favorite Tip episode? Will you go back to an interview from the past and I pick out my favorite tip for the interview In today's show, I've selected an extract from my chat with Ben Shuri, who took me through how to make the perfect egg breakfast, and I promise you you will never think about cooking eggs in the same way again.
I would say, though, that it takes just as long to make a bad breakfast as it does to make a good breakfast if not longer, especially if you factor in the lack of productivity that you're going to have from eating that terrible breakfast and how it's going to make you feel afterwards. So probably the first and foremost thing about making a really good breakfast. Let's just say eggs, for example, eggs are not as easy, you know, as
they might seem. To give you a little tip on poaching eggs, something that I've learned to poach eggs successfully is to have a pot of water. It's a bit deeper than you think it should be, and to have a bit more volume of water than you think you need. So I would probably be poaching eggs and about twenty centimeters of water. I would have it just below boiling, just a gentle simmer at the start. I always put in a cap full of white vinegar, not white wine vinegar.
White vinegar, the cheap stuff that helps the eggs cook and helps the protein set nicely. And now some people will swear by cooking eggs room temperature, others from the fridge. I'm take from the fridge and cook egg egg guy, no salt in the water.
What I would do. They will take a spoon and I.
Will swirl that water a little bit like a little bit like a whirlpool, and then that will spin. That water will spin in the saucepan. And then I'll take my egg and I'll crack it directly into that gently swirling the water slowing as I'm adding the eggs. And what that does is it helps the egg whites that wrap around the yolk, and you get a nicer shape. I would then turn the water down a little bit.
I don't want it to summer or boil at all as I'm poaching them, and then just very simply drain the eggs, take the egg from the saucepan with a slotted spoon. I might just touch the bottom of the egg on a paper towel. So my toast is not soggy and proper bread, something with structure and really good butter.
Now you might be thinking, well.
Really good butter is expensive. I always say it is expensive, but use less. You know, that's kind of I guess, probably part of my cooking philosophy to buy the best ingredients you can afford, and if you can't afford a lot of them, just buy a small amount of them eat more vegetables, less meat.
That's the way to go.
What is the best butter?
What should we be buying?
Well, if you're in Victoria, the best butter I think, I mean, I'm going to sound terribly arrogant.
Here is the butter that we make by hand at Attica.
But if you're just looking to buy butter, Ghipsland, Jersey make an exceptionally good cultured butter from Jersey cows.
And selfishly, I want to know how do you make a good omelet because I feel like that's my.
Go to egg dish.
Sure, give me some tips for that.
The best eggs, you must start with the best eggs fresh.
And how do I know what are the best egs?
Well, the best way to know.
If you're lucky enough to be able to afford to go to a farmer's market or to have a farmer's market close to you, the best thing to do is to make friends with the free range egg farmer at the farmer's market, and then you would be able to determine how old the eggs are, and what the conditions on the farm are like, and how many hens per squimeter and these types of things I would say avoid eggs from supermarkets would be my definite advice if you can,
because you just don't know how long they've been hanging around, how long they've been in the distribution center before they got to the supermarket, and how long they've even been at the supermarket before you brought them. So, if not from a farmer's market, definitely from a small or a local independent grosser.
So once you've got good eggs, and it's actually not a hard thing to buy in Australia, the good eggs, we're very lucky. If you go to North America, good luck trying to buy good eggs.
So take the eggs and I like to do a two egg onlet. So you need a lovely pan, that's really helpful.
What's a good omelet pan.
Well, I've got a pan by all Clad, all c lad or Clad.
I like it very much. It's got a copper core. It's quite an expensive pan.
But again that's a relative thing because the pan that I've got will last my entire life. And if you buy it's not a nonstick pan. If you buy nonstick pans, they're not the greatest. They wear out in your life. You might have twenty non stick pans, which would be more expensive than my expensive all clad pan. So again, if you can afford it, the best pan. Like, it's just a stainless steel copper core pan. And sometimes Sanmele steel pans are really sticky, but this one's not. It's smallish,
it's not huge. Say, it's probably got a twenty centimeter base. And what I do is I have my eggs, I crack them into a small bowl and I whisked them with a fork a whisk. Why is that Because I don't want to break them up too much. I want to break them up just enough. You'll still see in my almost little bits of white. I don't want to break down the texture and the structure of the egg too much, and you can almost collapse it, and it becomes, in my opinion, tougher, and it's stickier kind of to
the pan, and it's just not as nice. I like to have my pan on a medium heat, not too low, not too high.
I like to put a little bit of olive oil into.
The pan first, like I would say, a half teaspoon and teaspoon, swell that around, whist my eggs. Most of the time I don't season my eggs, but you can season, but there's definitely skills of thoughts on whether or not they should be season.
At that point, I don't seison them in the bowl.
I add a knob a good butter again, and I watch a foam now and it's not going brown or black at this point, it's just fiming.
So it's got a good temperature.
But that the butter is not burning, I will pour the eggs into it, using us specially to get all of the egg out of the bowl.
That's approach it. You never leave anything in the bowl for any preparation in cooking.
And I like to use a spatula to make my omelets, a rubber spatula like some chefs seem to call them Maurice's, but it's always just a spacheler for me. And I just shake the pan gently above the element.
A little bit. I then allow the eggs to cover the entire base of the pan and cook a little bit, and then I quickly use.
My spatula to stir them just once, and then I'll probably take the pan off the heat and just let the heat of the pan do the cooking of the omelet.
Now, sometimes if I'm putting something in it.
I'd like to put a small amount of gria or a parmesan or even a soft cheese, and then I'm going to basically take the handle of.
The pan in my left hand and I'm going to lift it a little.
Bit so that the pan is now on an angle sloping down towards the stove, and I'm going to use the spatula to roll my omelet into the shape of cigars. It's a very classic style of making omelets. What I'm looking for is that nice, even round cigar. I'm letting the omelet roll on itself. I'm using the gravity because I've elevated the pan on an angle in my left hand, and.
At the end or just give it a little tap to help the omelet form into the cigar.
And then I will use that same angle, the same sort of awkward looking angle to put on the plate now the key. In my opinion, omelet should have no color on it, should be no brown on it at all. It should be golden like yellow, the color of the egg. And that's how I do it. I always want the omelet to be a little bit runny in the middle, especially as eggs will continue to cook in the pan.
And then a little bit when they're on the plate as well.
That is it for today's show. If you haven't done so already, you might want to connect with me on the social channels where I post additional content. You can find me on LinkedIn just search Amantha Imber. I'm on Twitter at Amantha and on Instagram at Amantha I. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios and thank you to Martin Nimba who did the audio mix and makes everything sound better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.