Photo: Claire Lower
Pasta is a breakfast food. Like toast, it is carb. It also tastes good with eggs, bacon, and cheese, three things I like to eat in the morning. (American breakfast foods are one of the few things that make me feel vaguely patriotic.) My breakfast pastas tend to be involved however, whether it’s a bowl of carbonara or a full-blown breakfast lasagna, and not well-suited for busy weekday mornings. But this breakfast pasta from Food52 comes together in fewer than 15 minutes, and it is warm, savory, and comforting.
It also meshes well with my obsession with mixing raw eggs into hot carbs. The Japanese dish tamago kake gohan is probably the most classic example of this. All you do is crack a raw egg (or egg yolk) over a pile of hot rice, mix it in, and season with soy sauce. The heat from the rice lightly cooks the egg, creating a saucy, custardy, comforting mixture, which is exactly what happens in this pasta recipe (except it’s the heat from the noodles, not rice, obviously).
In addition to a cup of your favorite pasta and an egg, all you need to make this dish is a couple of tablespoons of butter. Cook the pasta according to the package instructions in a pot of salted water, drain it—do not, under any circumstances, rinse the starch off—then melt the butter in the pasta pot. Add the noodles back to the pot, toss with butter, then move the pot off of the hot burner (just turn it off if you have a gas stove), and crack the egg directly into the pot. Stir with great vigor until the egg disperses into the buttered noodles, creating a sauce.
From there, you can finish it with a little everything-bagel seasoning, crispy bacon bits, or a fluffy pile of microplaned cheese. At that point, you’re basically making a lazy carbonara, and that’s not a bad thing.
