Breakfast beyond eggs: nine low-carb starts that are not another omelette

Every low-carb breakfast list is eggs. Scrambled eggs, fried eggs, boiled eggs, eggs in a muffin tin, eggs with cheese, eggs with bacon. There is nothing wrong with eggs — they are cheap, fast, and about as low in carbohydrate as food gets. But eat them every morning for three weeks and you will hit the wall, and the morning you hit it is the morning you eat toast.

So here is the rest of the repertoire. Nine of them, sorted by how much time they actually take.

Five minutes or less

1. Full-fat yoghurt with toasted nuts and a few berries. The whole thing hangs on buying the right yoghurt: full-fat Greek or natural, with milk and cultures on the label and nothing else. Anything marketed as low-fat or fruit-flavoured has had sugar put back in to make up for what was taken out. Toast a handful of almonds or hazelnuts in a dry pan once a week and keep them in a jar — it takes four minutes and changes the texture of the whole bowl.

2. Smoked mackerel, straight from the packet, with lemon. Oily, filling, no cooking. Flake it over a handful of watercress if you want it to look like a meal. The peppered fillets are the ones to buy.

3. Coffee with cream instead of milk, and something solid alongside. Cream in coffee is not breakfast on its own, whatever the internet says — a fat-only morning with nothing to chew tends to fall apart by eleven. Have it with a boiled egg you cooked yesterday or a piece of cheese.

4. Avocado with chilli flakes, lime and flaky salt. Obvious, but people skip it because half an avocado feels insubstantial. Eat the whole one.

Ten to fifteen minutes

5. Mushrooms cooked properly. This means a hot pan, not much oil, and leaving them alone. Sliced mushrooms put into a crowded, cool pan release their water and stew. Cook them in two batches in a wide pan, do not stir for the first two minutes, then finish with butter, garlic and parsley. On a plate with a spoonful of crème fraîche this is a better breakfast than most cooked breakfasts.

6. Halloumi and tomatoes in one pan. Slice the halloumi thumb-thick, dry-fry it until the surface blisters, then throw halved cherry tomatoes in for the last minute so they collapse into the salty fat. Black pepper, no salt needed.

7. Chicken from last night, fried in butter with greens. Leftover roast chicken, torn, hit hard in a pan with butter until the edges crisp, then a bag of spinach thrown in to wilt. This is the best thing on the list and it takes eight minutes.

8. A slice of yesterday’s frittata, warmed. Yes, this is eggs — but it is eggs you already cooked, which is a different proposition at half past seven. Make it on Sunday, cut it into six, eat it across the week cold or warmed in a pan.

Make it the night before

9. Chia soaked in coconut milk. Four tablespoons of chia seeds into a jar with tinned full-fat coconut milk, a pinch of salt, and vanilla if you have it. Stir, leave overnight, and by morning it has set into something like a loose pudding. Top with a few raspberries. This is the one to make if you want a sweet breakfast without a sweetener, because the coconut does the work.

The two things that actually decide whether you eat breakfast

Buy for the mornings specifically. Most failed breakfasts are shopping failures, not cooking failures. If the yoghurt, the nuts and the smoked fish are not in the house on Tuesday, Tuesday is a coffee-and-nothing morning, and coffee-and-nothing mornings are how people end up eating whatever is in the office kitchen at eleven.

Cook once for three mornings. The frittata, the toasted nuts and the chia pots all keep for days. Fifteen minutes on Sunday buys three weekday breakfasts, and that trade is the single highest-value thing in this entire article.

A breakfast you can assemble half-asleep beats a better breakfast you have to think about.

On skipping it

Plenty of people who eat this way are not hungry in the morning and simply do not eat until lunch, and that is a perfectly reasonable thing to do if it suits you. It is not a requirement and it is not a virtue. If you are hungry, eat; the list above is for the mornings when you are.

If you are managing a health condition or taking medication that assumes a meal at a particular time, that is a question for your doctor rather than for a cooking site.

Where to start

Do the nuts. Toast a big handful of almonds in a dry pan this week, tip them into a jar, and leave the jar next to the yoghurt. It is the smallest possible piece of preparation and it makes the two easiest breakfasts on this list worth eating instead of merely edible.