Morning Excesses and Egg-sistential Dreads 🍳
The best place to look for egg substitutes, hack mayo, bake Miyazaki's cakes, and play pasta roulette in a spirit of genuine excess
Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to look for egg substitutes, hack mayo, bake Miyazaki's cakes, and play pasta roulette in a spirit of genuine overindulgence
Hi there!
This one marks the fourth issue since Secret Breakfast became a 100% totally open newsletter.
The email should land in your inbox with no problems (please, move it away from spam or promotion folder). No affiliated links, no sponsors. The website has no gates or pop-ups, and you can search almost everything from the archives of the past years.
I hope you find this newsletter a reliable alternative to less trustworthy gatekeepers and a safe space from those ubiquitous algorithms.
New improvements are coming, but for now, enjoy the many interesting links of this issue. Or let them sit, disconnect, and just enjoy Spring!
Photograph: Niharika Kulkarni/AFP/Getty Images. Prayagra, India. Candyfloss sellers at the end of the Maha Kumbh Mela festival.
✹Hunter S. Thompson, writer. It goes like this, if you want the full experience: “Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner. I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home — and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed — breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys (★recipe), two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes (★recipe), a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette (★recipe) or eggs Benedict (★recipe), a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie (★recipe), two margaritas (★recipe), and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert (✖︎no recipe)… Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music… All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked”.
MSG, as in My Secret Guilt
Calvin Eng's cookbook elevates familiar dishes with clever tweaks, exemplified by his extra-plush Hong Kong egg scramble, proving even simple recipes can showcase culinary mastery, much like a well-executed egg in a professional kitchen. Eng's approach, focused on home cooking, avoids fussy restaurant techniques, instead offering accessible upgrades like shrimp-paste butter and beefy black bean garlic sauce, proving that even a "haiyaa" level (hi, Uncle Roger!) of MSG joke loving chef can create approachable and delicious food.
Salt Sugar MSG: Recipes and Stories from a Cantonese American by Calvin Eng with Phoebe Melnick
→ Shortplot: 🍤 🍚 🧄 🧂
The Unhappiest Days of an Egg-sistential Despair
Recent outbreaks of avian influenza (bird flu) have caused egg prices to surge globally.
Some restaurant chains in the US have implemented surcharges on menu items containing eggs, while others have chosen to absorb the increased costs.
Notably, when avian influenza is detected on an egg farm, all poultry on the premises are culled to prevent further spread. Consequently, the impact is greatest on countries with larger, intensive farming operations (For now, it's just an example, Canada has plenty of eggs). This highlights the vulnerability of large-scale, intensive farming to disease outbreaks.
Food websites are hatching hundreds of posts about eggs and substitutions. Here we go:
Egg Prices Are (Still) Up. Here Are 5 Easy Substitutes.
25 Desserts That Don’t Require a Single Egg, From Cookies to Cheesecake
And this Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes Recipe
💐22 Spring Pasta Ideas (★recipes) 🥚14 Ways to Hack Store-Bought Mayonnaise 🌮Misleading emoji for Jose Pizarro’s recipe for hot cross torrijas with saffron syrup (★recipe) 🫚The BBC Maestro Visual Spice Guide 🧈Timothée Chalamet, but wearing a butter suit 🤓Bill Gates' favorite book is about food 📖Finally, Vittles Goes on Paper 🔫5 Things to Do When Another Diner Is Being Too Loud 🤳🏻Selfie sticks and AK–47s: the surreal rise of Taliban tourism 🟩 Create a map of your life with each week as a little box 🍝Pasta Roulette 🍞Cinnamon toast cookies! (★recipe) 🎧From 2025 SXSW, listen to From the “Strawberry Girl” aesthetic to “Blueberry Milk” nails, the collision of food, beauty and fashion is trending and #TrashQueens: The Women Reimagining Food from the Waste Up 📋Some Fresh White Lotus Memes for your group chat
How Beyond Meat and the plant-based meat industry lost their allure
Jeff Huang / CNBC
Ok, this somehow makes me happy, since one no-written rule of this newsletter is that we (=me) don't like things shaped like other things.
The Weight of Our Time
Marie Dollé / In Bed With Social
In cooking we use scales. A lot. Because in the physical world, weight is tangible. In the digital world, weight dissolves. "The issue isn’t weight itself, but its invisibility. What cannot be seen cannot be measured, and what cannot be measured cannot be controlled". From Gravity Economy to Social Density, Marie writes how to find our weight again.
