Recipe for English Breakfast with ‘Udon’ by TheSocialFood

The combination isn’t necessarily an obvious one, but it works. In this recipe from their book The Social Food: Home Cooking Inspired by the Flavours of the World, Shirley Garrier and Mathieu Zouhairi offer a breakfast that pairs the crispiness and indulgence of bacon and hash browns with the chewiness of Japanese udon noodles. The dish is served in a bowl of dashi broth, thus adding a dose of umami. 

It’s an ambitious concept, one that strays far from the codes of the ‘conventional’ Japanese breakfast, in which dashi and udon are replaced by miso soup and rice. The final Japanese twist to the recipe is the inclusion of shiitake mushrooms that, along with spring onions, add a vegetable-based touch to this breakfast. 

The Social Food: Home Cooking Inspired by the Flavours of the World compiles 80 recipes that allow readers to travel around the world without leaving their kitchen. ‘The Social Food is about our taste for travelling and our fascination for the different culinary cultures, and now our experiences in the kitchen’, the duo explain. Shirley Garrier and Mathieu Zouhairi draw inspiration from Japan in particular, with a number of the recipes coming from the country. The book contains street food staples and more traditional dishes, as well as recipes that fuse different cultures, like this breakfast. 

Serves 2 

Ingredients

200 g udon 

1 large potato

1 onion

3 eggs

1 tbsp flour

2 tbsp mirin

2 tsp sugar

2 tbsp soy sauce 

6 shiitake

800 ml dashi broth

2 rashers bacon

1 spring onion

Olive oil

Butter

Salt and pepper

Method

Grate the potato and onion, add a pinch of salt and pepper and press to remove the excess moisture.

Add one beaten egg and 1 tbsp flour.

In a pan, add 1 tsp olive oil and 1 knob of butter, add the grated potato and onion and cook for 5 minutes on each side over a medium heat.

In a saucepan, heat the dashi broth with the mirin, sugar and soy sauce.

Cook the shiitake in the broth for 4 minutes then remove.

Cook the bacon in the oven for 10 minutes at 180°C.

Cook the udon in boiling water for 8 minutes.

Fry the 2 eggs with olive oil.

Pour a ladle of dashi broth and the noodles into a bowl, then add the rest of the ingredients along with the chopped spring onion.

The Social Food: Home Cooking Inspired by the Flavours of the World (2022), a recipe book by Shirley Garrier and Mathieu Zouhairi published by Rizzoli.

Shirley Garrier and Mathieu Zouhairi are behind the Instagram account The Social Food where they share their travels, restaurant recommendations and recipes. Shirley Garrier, a self-taught chef who took part in the show Masterchef in 2013, creates the recipes, and Mathieu Zouhairi captures them on camera. It was on their return from Japan, with cupboards full of Japanese products, that they started sharing their recipes on the social media platform. These recipes now appear in this book, The Social Food: Home Cooking Inspired by the Flavours of the World.