Seriously good breakfast to start your day
By Ari Weinzweig
If you like the mac and cheese at the Roadhouse—and clearly a lot of you do—you might try starting your day with this really good dish. To my pasta-loving palate, a plate of world-class artisan pasta, topped with chopped applewood-smoked bacon and a couple of over-easy eggs is a wonderful way to start the day!
Why our Mac & Eggs is so good!
The maccheroni is made by the Martelli family, in Tuscany. It’s made with very high-quality grain, is extruded through old-school bronze dies to yield the rough surface that absorbs the sauce so beautifully (in this case, the yolk of the over-easy egg that sits atop it when we serve the dish). Commercial pastas are extruded through much less costly Teflon, which leaves a slick surface that the sauce runs right off. The Martelli maccheroni is dried very slowly for about 60 hours at low temperatures. Industrial pastas, by contrast, are dried in a matter of hours at much higher temperatures which basically “bakes” the pasta leaving it brittle. The flavor—from the quality of the grain and all the careful handling throughout—is outstanding. The bacon comes from the Nueske family up in Wittenberg, Wisconsin. It’s smoked for 24 hours over whole applewood logs and is so good that the late writer R.W. Apple once called it, “the Rolls Royce of bacons.”
To make the dish at breakfast, we take that very terrific maccheroni and toss it with diced up applewood-smoked bacon and top it all with a couple fried eggs. I like to grind on lots of the terrific farm-to-table Tellicherry black pepper we have on the tables. Wonderful way to start your day!