Breakfast Pide
Starting the weekend with a good meal is important
Hello! Today’s recipe is my first proper breakfast recipe, in honour of Lucy Dearlove and Lecker Podcast, whose Breakfast Season I was thrilled to be a part of. I’m calling it Breakfast Pide. It’s an easy arrangement of just a few ingredients, but you do need to make the dough the night before you plan to eat (or buy shop-bought dough balls - no one is going to judge you, least of all me). I hope you’ll agree, when you’re spreading your yolk over your cheesy, blistered flatbread, that it’s very much worth it!
Eating food on holiday is always stimulating, and this recipe was inspired by a pastry I ate in Madrid from Santo Bakehouse in Malasaña. It was a spiral of flaky pastry filled with feta cheese, then covered in a very sesame-heavy za’atar and honey. Just those few ingredients, but it tasted absolutely amazing. Unforgettable. So good I ate it twice.
I wanted to use the same flavour combination in a breakfast dish, but with the addition of everyone’s favourite breakfast item: eggs. And so: Breakfast Pide. Starting the weekend with a good breakfast is, for me, what marks a Saturday out from any other day of the week. It says ‘today is going to be a good day’ in food form. Co-Star can try, but a good meal in my tummy sets me up for the day better than any astrological insight.
Breakfast Pide
For the dough (this makes extra because if you’re making dough you may as well get your time’s worth)
510g flour
1g yeast
290g lukewarm water
5 flaky salt
Or use shop-bought dough balls
For the topping
125g feta
100g soft goat’s cheese (I used Abergavenny goat’s cheese from Sainsbury’s)
1 tbsp runny yogurt
3 tbsp za’atar* (see tips below)
2 tbsp runny honey or chilli honey
2 tbsp olive oil
2 eggs
A herb to garnish (optional - any of basil, dill, mint, parsley, oregano or coriander)
To make the dough the day before you plan to eat, add the yeast into the lukewarm water and leave for 5 minutes, it’s a small amount of yeast so don’t worry if you don’t see the bubbles forming, just make sure your yeast isn’t very old/hasn’t been kept open and outside of the fridge.
Place the flour in a large bowl then add the yeast and water mixture and mix the dough until shaggy. Rest for 10 minutes, then add the 5g flaky salt and knead it in until you can’t feel the crystals anymore. Knead in a standmixer for 8 minutes on medium or by hand for 10 minutes, until the dough feels stretchy and you can pull a piece apart in your hand without it tearing.
Leave the dough in an oiled bowl, covered with a pan lid or cling film, overnight, until it has tripled in size. The next morning (if you want to eat at say, 10am, do this a bit before 8am), knock the dough back with your fist, and then divide the dough into balls. I made 5 balls out of the dough (and we had the 3 remaining balls as pizzas another day), but you can make 2 or 3 bigger pides if you prefer! Ball the dough up by moving the balls round on the work surface like a gearstick in your hand, until the top is taut. Pull the seam at the bottom and pinch it together so there aren’t gaps. Place on an oiled tray to rise in size again and go puffy (about 1.5hrs). Any dough balls you don’t use today can be kept in the fridge to be used within 2-3 days - just remove from the fridge an hour before you wish to use them.
Blend or mash the feta and goat’s cheese together with the yogurt until it’s a paste. It will look quite thick but don’t worry.
When you’re nearly ready to eat, place your grill on high and get a dry frying pan on a high heat. Lay some semolina or flour down on your work surface, and then, using the pads of your fingers take one of your doughballs and flatten it out from the middle outwards, leaving a bit of a crust. Stretch and ease the dough with the backs of your hands to create a circle that’s about as big as your frying pan (I use a 20cm pan). Using a brush or your fingers, gently spread some olive oil around the crust of the dough and sprinkle some za’atar around the crust so that it sticks to it.
Place the circle of dough in the hot pan now, then take 3 tbsp of the cheese mixture and gently spread it on top. Don’t worry if it doesn’t spread at first because as it warms it will become easier to spread. Cook until the bottom of the pide looks golden and well-done, then crack your egg on top of the pide, season with salt, then place the frying pan underneath the grill for the crust and egg to finish cooking.
Remove the pide on to a plate and cover, then repeat with the second pide. Finish both off by drizzling a little olive oil, and plenty of honey all over the pide. Sprinkle with more za’atar if you like, and a herb to garnish. Spread your yolk all over everything when you sit down to eat and enjoy!!
Tips
*If you don’t have za’atar you can make your own. Just combine 2 tbsp toasted sesame seeds with 1 tbsp each of dried oregano, cumin powder, pounded coriander seeds, and sumac. Add ½ tsp of aleppo chilli flakes and salt to taste.
This week Charlotte Gill, somebody none of us had heard of until this week, but apparently a ‘Breakfast Producer @GBNews’ decided to take to Twitter to tell teenagers that they should get a summer holiday job fruit picking, instead of enjoy the final few summers of their lives when they don’t have any responsibilities. This would aid the country’s crippling housing issue, Charlotte surmised, which she says is worsened by “hiring more migrants” to do these jobs.
This woman’s hateful thoughts, with their barely veiled message that teen and migrant workers alike are not to be considered of value, are representative of our cursed country at large. They are symbolic of what little respect and humaneness we offer food production and service workers. The very many “why don’t you go and pick berries yourself Charlotte” replies being a sad reminder that such disrespect is commonplace.
In farming, factories, and all the way along the food production chain to hospitality, the scorn shown to the people literally putting food on our tables is mind boggling. And I do think it’s unique to Britain. In other countries, the dreaded phrase “proper jobs” does not seem to permeate culture in such a way as to tar every manual profession. Picking fruit is as important a job as presenting the news, accounting, coding, digital marketing or cooking school dinners. Isn’t it? Not a punishment to bestow onto schoolchildren OR Tweeting bigots!
Catch you next time, when I’ll be venturing into dessert territory again…