Lights, camera, breakfast: recreating morning morsels from the screen
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Welcome to this festive edition of our series ‘The Breakfast Club’, where we show you how to recreate breakfast dishes from the screen so you can munch morning morsels along with your favourite characters.
We're Christmas obsessed at Bite Club and are celebrating the festive season by munching our way through HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS. Join us in Whoville as we indulge in this decadent breakfast hash that thankfully, won’t be coming out of a can.
‘Who Hash’ never makes an appearance out of its tin, so with a sprinkling of creative licence, we’re sticking to the hash essentials of potato and roast (cured) beast, with this tantalising Chorizo Hash. A luxurious breakfast dish suited to Cindy-Lou Who once she is a grown up (Gossip) Girl dining in the snazzy restaurants of NYC.
This is a fable about a festive table,A morning feast fit for a beast. We never see ‘Who Hash’ out of the can, So this is a game of ‘Guess Who Hash’ if you can. An Imagined version to fill your kitchen with pride, Fit for Cindy-Lou Humphries on the Upper East Side. 
For all of you Taylor Momsen fanboys who are here for her and her alone, boy do we have a treat for you! Make sure you check out our Gobblebox series where we recreate recipes from television, because there’s Gossip going around that something special is coming soon…
XOXO
You can find the Who Hash recipe written below, but if you haven’t watched the episode yet, make sure to head over to our YouTube channel and check it out.
WHO HASH
Features at 1 hour &11 minutes of How The Grinch Stole Christmas
INGREDIENTS (serves 2)
100g chorizo
3 medium white floury potatoes (eg. Maris Piper)
1 medium brown onion
1 sweet pepper
2 handfuls of spinach
TO SERVE
2 eggs poached or fried to your liking
Hollandaise sauce- optional, recipe linked here
METHOD
Thinly slice the onion and pepper. Heat a frying pan on medium and add a tbsp of olive oil to the pan. Add the onion and fry for 5 mins until translucent.
Add the pepper and cook for a further 10 mins. If it starts to catch, add a little water to the pan, avoiding adding additional oil or it will become greasy.
Once the peppers and onions are softened and lightly caramelised, add the spinach and cook for 2-3 mins until wilted. Remove the vegetable from the pan and set aside.
Bring to the boil a large pot of salted water. Meanwhile, wash the potatoes and dice into 1.5 cm cubes. Place the potato cubes in the boiling water for 3 mins. Remove, and drain the potatoes- leave them in the colander to steam and dry out whilst you prep the chorizo.
Reheat the frying pan on a medium-high heat. Slice the chorizo into rounds around 0.5cm thick. Fry the chorizo for 3-5 mins until the slices begin to colour and have released their pungent orange oils. Remove the chorizo from the pan using a slotted spoon, leaving the fat released from the sausage behind. Leave the chorizo to drain on a little kitchen roll.
Top up the chorizo fat with a glug of olive oil and throw in the potato cubes. Fry the potato for 5 - 7 mins until crispy and golden on the outside. nb: You gotta make sure you’re pan isn’t crowded, and avoid moving them around a lot or they won’t go crispy!
Season with a crack of pepper and a dash of salt to taste and continue to cook for a further minute. Grinch branded salt and pepper shakers are not essential.
Add the chorizo, peppers, onions and spinach back into the pan for a minute or two until heated through. Add a final flourish of salt and pepper to taste.
You can serve the hash with a simple fried egg but to ramp up the decadence this holiday season, an oozy poached egg and a glug of hollandaise sauce are the perfect final festive flourish.
HOLLANDAISE SAUCE
I have a love, hate relationship with Hollandaise sauce… Love eating it, hate making it. It is the definition of deceptively simple. Minimal ingredients, simple method, but can go wrong at every turn. You have to exercise extreme precision in your execution.
Chic, elegant and extremely fussy… could it be any more French.
Hollandaise is a French ‘mother sauce’ which means it is a foundational sauce that with additions, can be transformed into derivative sauces or ‘daughter sauces’. For example, with the addition of fresh tarragon, Hollandaise sauce becomes Bearnaise.
Hollandaise is a warm emulsion sauce based on egg yolks and melted butter. An emulsion is a mixture of liquids that inherently want nothing to do with one another that you have to force together. Because these temperamental ingredients don’t want to come together, you have to create the right conditions to make it happen, and then tread cautiously because they could split at any point. This is all reminding me of my days as a Reality TV Producer…
Now I have smacked you around the head with negativity, let's get back track because it’s so worth the effort. Hollandaise is bloody delicious, versatile and down right impressive. Once you’ve got got a grip on the fundamentals, it’s quick to pull together, goes with SO many things and the basic recipe of 50g of butter to every egg yolk can easily be scaled up to serve your needs.
(I think) I have finally got to a point where I’ve got the teckers down for foolproof execution. There are lots of tips below that you might not find on an approved syllabus at Le Cordon Bleu, but they work out alright for me.
Now I just need you to follow my rules to the letter, then and only then will you make me happy and be successful.
Welcome to the cult.
INGREDIENTS (serves 2)
50g cold unsalted butter*
1 egg yolk
Lemon to taste (about 1 tbsp)
METHOD
Cube your cold butter into 1 cm pieces.
Create a bain-marie; place a heat-proof bowl over a gently simmering pot of water on a low heat.
Add the egg yolk to the bowl and whisk continuously for about a minute until it becomes pale in colour.
Add the butter to the bowl 1-2 pieces at a time, whisking continuously.
Once melted, add the next 1-2 pieces of butter. Repeat until all the butter is incorporated.
Remove from the heat, add lemon juice and salt to taste. If the sauce is too thick, add water 1/4 tsp at a time until you reach the desired consistency. This will make the sauce paler in colour. nb: can be made ahead of time and reheated just before serving.
TIPS
*Use unsalted butter. I usually ignore this instruction in recipes but in this instance you gotta do it so you can control the seasoning
If the pan is too hot, the mixture is more likely to split. Keep it on a very low heat and lift the bowl off the heat frequently to keep the temp down. Err on the side of caution. It is better for the sauce to be too cool than too hot.
Adding cold butter reduces the temperature of the mixture with each addition. Traditionally, melted butter is used but I personally find this cold butter method more successful.
Add the butter VERY slowly. These small additions make it easier to emulsify the mixture and adding the butter too much at a time or too quickly, increases the chance of it splitting.
Don’t add the lemon until the end. I don’t understand the science of this but I have found that if you add the acid too early it can split the sauce.
You will require more lemon and salt to flavour the sauce than you expect. High fat content foods requires more seasoning than leaner foods.
If the sauce does split, most of the time it can be rectified. You will know it’s split because the fat will separate to the top of the mixture and it will look curdled. Add an ice cube, and whisk until the ice cube has melted into the sauce. The addition of water and reduction in temperature usually brings the sauce back together.
In short… keep the temperature low, add the butter slowly and keep whisking!
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