Breakfast has always been an important meal in our family but rarely one that is newsworthy. So I was surprised to get an SMS message from my daughter, Celia, as I sat down to my bowl of oatmeal recently. She had sent a photo of a puffy muffin dotted with chocolate chips. Was this breakfast or dessert? It turned out to be both.
Baked Oats is the latest iteration of the overnight oats culinary phenomenon, a TikTok-worthy mash-up of rolled oats, banana, egg and maple syrup. I had to admit it looked like an improvement on the soggy oat concoction that inspired it, but I’m not one to criticize. At her age I was substituting prunes for chocolate in brownies. I confess to raising a child who aspires to having her cake and eating it too.
Breakfast cereal is a 19th century American creation which has largely abandoned the healthy objectives of its inventors. Supermarkets today devote an entire aisle to boxed cereals filled with puffed, colored and sweetened corn and grains. Who among us cannot identify the rustle of flakes or the rattle of puffed balls as they hit the bottom of a breakfast bowl? Or the scent of sugar and fake vanilla wafting up as a flood of cold milk swamps the dish?
It was only a matter of time before a creative pastry chef would champion the flavor associated with this indelible childhood memory. When Christina Tosi opened Milk Bar in the East Village section of New York City in 2008, it was an instant success. Her secret? The milk in her cakes and pastry spent a night soaking up the grain, sugar and flavorings in breakfast cereal. To heightens the sense of childhood delight Christina eliminates frosting and folds bits of colored cereal into the cake layers.
In Modena, Italy the morning meal in the kitchen of Massimo Botturo’s three star restaurant is the bread remaining from last evening’s service, soaked in milk with sugar to taste. This is the breakfast Massimo fondly remembers eating in the home of his prosperous Bolognese family. His reverence for the value of stale bread has evolved with his rising prominence into a commitment to reduce food waste.
Massimo champions this perspective on the gastronomic level in visually stunning presentations. One signature dish consists of an artful arranged pile of torn pizza crust. Then there’s a lemon tart that is served looking as if it had been dropped on its way to the table.
Botturo put this idealistic concept into practice at the 2015 Milan Expo that attracted 184 countries, each exhibiting its response to the motto: Feed the Planet, Energy for Life. Botturo created weekly menus using leftover ingredients collected from the expo booths. With the help of volunteer designers and carpenters, he turned an empty theatre in one of Milan's underserved neighborhoods into a soup kitchen in the style of a monastic refectory.
Le Refettorio Ambrosiano served five meals a week to the impoverished residents of the surrounding Milanese neighborhood during and even after the Expo. An international roster of celebrity chefs took turns spending a week in a makeshift kitchen creating beautiful,, substantive meals from donations and writing down the recipes as they created them. One of the more unexpected recipes in the cookbook published afterward is a Brazilian chef’s banana peel chutney. The enormous success of Le Refettorio Ambrosiano inspired Botturo and his American wife to chair foundation that will continue these projects.
Do you find breakfast inspiring? Feel free to share your thoughts and recipes at
