Recipe: Ottolenghi’s Easy Breakfast Potatoes Will Get Everyone Out of Bed

Ottolenghi’s new cookbook, Simple Too, features 135 recipes delivering maximum flavour for minimal effort. Take this simple combo of “two great Spanish potato dishes”: patatas a lo pobre (poor man's potatoes) and huevos rotos (broken eggs). It's what to make when you’re catering for guests before midday. 

“Traditionally both fried, here we bake. Not to be virtuous, it's just easy,” writes Ottolenghi. “One tray, one mandoline (if you have one, it makes light work of slicing the potatoes and shallots), and you have easily fed a crowd.”

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Ottolenghi’s breakfast potatoes

Serves 6
Preparation time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 1 hour

Ingredients

1kg Yukon Gold, Maris Piper (or other floury) potatoes, unpeeled and thinly sliced
2 red peppers, deseeded and thinly sliced (300g)
4 oregano sprigs
3 large banana shallots, thinly sliced (200g)
1 head of garlic, top 1cm removed
1 tsp sweet smoked paprika
150ml olive oil
6 eggs
Fine sea salt and black pepper

Method

Preheat the oven to 190°C fan. Put everything apart from the eggs on a large baking tray (about 28cm x 40cm x 4cm), along with 1¼ teaspoons of salt and plenty of pepper. Mix together well and bake for 30 minutes. 

Remove from the oven, turn everything over and bake for another 30 minutes (turning the vegetables over again halfway through), until the potatoes are soft and jammy and the peppers and shallots are frazzled. Remove from the oven, squeeze the garlic cloves out of their skins and fold them through.

Crack the eggs into a jug, season with a pinch of salt and some pepper, then lightly break with a fork: just enough to burst the yolks. Create a few small pockets in the potato mixture, then pour in the eggs. Return to the oven for 5 minutes, or until the eggs are just cooked through.

This is an edited extract from Ottolenghi Simple Too by Yotam Ottolenghi and Verena Lochmuller. Published by Ebury Press (RRP $69.99) with photography by Jonathan Lovekin.