The BLT Rule for Extra Hard Things 🥪

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Welcome to Secret Breakfast / An exclusive newsletter, the best place to start your day with non-existent profit margins, a 7UP sheet cake, and future mercenaries mixing mustard in the kitchen of their family apartment

BLT, bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich

Hi there!

Sometimes life looks like a Tetris game when pieces are falling too fast for you.

Or think about when you’re cooking and you have 4 stoves on, something in the oven and somebody ringing the doorbell.

Sometimes things are simply too much and the only solution is to take a step back, slow down, and make things simpler.

I call it the “BLT rule”, inspired by this apparently simple sandwich: bacon, tomato, lettuce, mayo, and bread (want a good start? Try this recipe).

Is it that simple? It’s not. You can get those 5 ingredients in no time, but I bet you can’t get 5/5 “A grade” in less than 2 or 3 hours.

The lesson here is, to slow down and give more quality to what you do. It’s a kind of luxury we often forget.

Piero

Noah Verrier oil paints contemporary food. Check him out.

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THE BEST QUOTE

✦ Jony Ive, designer.

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THE MISSING INGREDIENT

THE BEAR SEASON 2 WILL SHOW YOU WHY HOSPITALITY IT’S EXTRA HARD

The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster

I’ll put it plain and simple: stop doing whatever you’re doing, open Hulu, and watch The Bear Season 2.

It’s mandatory you get to the end of Episode 6.

No, I mean it: close this newsletter, you can read it later.

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The Bear season 1 was this: “A young chef from the fine dining world returns to Chicago to run his family's sandwich shop”. Season 1 to me was a ★★★★☆ show.

Season 2 is about his efforts to transform the sandwich shop into a fine-dining restaurant. And it’s also about people changing to be worthy of that. And it’s also a restaurant world analysis, a family drama, and a love letter to this crazy business.

This business, like a lot of businesses, it sucks, right? But this one sucks extra hard 'cause the profit margins are non-existent.

Season 2 is definitely a ★★★★★ show: it’s surprising, well-written, painful, and yummy. It’s Chicago and Copenhagen, prep kitchens and family meals. It’s insomnia and pain in the stomach, meat and fishes (plural), trustworthy business partners and caring love partners. It’s Leading with the heart and Unreasonable Hospitality (literally). Order and chaos, flying forks and inexpensive tableware.

It’s a part of us, for sure.

The Bear, Season 2: Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri.

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THE BOOK

Spice up your dinner

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Lior Lev Sercarz is a “spice master”. He is the chef and owner at La Boîte, a destination spice atelier in New York City. You can have an idea of him reading the 5 tips for making the most of your spices, his treats for Food52 (★recipes), or his homemade pickles (★recipe). The book A Middle Eastern Pantry is an excellent start to introducing new flavors to your cooking: it’s a journey through Turkey, Tunisia, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Armenia, and Jordan.

A Middle Eastern Pantry: Essential Ingredients for Classic and Contemporary Recipes by Lior Lev Sercarz
→ Shortplot: 🐑 🍆 🍅 🌿

❍ OnlyPans
This is where Secret Breakfast picks juicy content from food creators

A few days ago, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s army almost took Moscow. And his ascent started with food.

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RANDOM ACTS OF HUNGER

This is the space where I share some food (un)related stuff of my week

🏀NBA Draft pick #2, Brandon Miller, must be one of us 🍰 7UP Sheet Cake with Strawberry Buttercream Frosting (★recipe) 🥇Start saving for your next meal abroad: The Worlds 50 Best Restaurants 🐓Cell-cultivated chicken was just approved for sale in the US. But it won’t be on grocery shelves anytime soon 🇰🇷The $40m bet that made South Korea a food and cultural power 🇩🇰🇯🇵Pumpkin katsuobushi and other Noma’s Notes about their Kyoto pop-up restaurant 🥚An egg-cellent odyssey through Tokyo’s best 'omurice' 🔥Made in fire: Bengal’s Pora 🍤Ixta’s prawn burgers with pineapple and Scotch bonnet salsa (★recipe, almost) 🍪The heat in Texas is so severe that a tray of cookies can be baked in a car: please, don’t forget your pets or kids in there 🧫David Zilber on Ferment Radio 🇫🇷36 Hours in Paris

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FOOD FOR LATER

The story of the man that started out selling hotdogs, mixing mustard in the kitchen of his family apartment, made millions feeding the army and is now the unpredictable cog in the Russian war.

The Paradox at the Grocery Store
Adam Fleming Petty / The Atlantic

Yes, too much choice is freedom, but it’s also bad for you.

➤ Last week's most clicked link was the one about Yotam Ottolenghi’s breakfasts from around the world. And that's all for today.