(cooking sounds medley) - Breakfast time and I'm eating chips. (chill out music) Okay so I made this video about why Americans eat dessert for breakfast. - [Narrator] Two pancakes
with hot syrup and butter. - And in that video, I
said I would share with you the non-American breakfast
I've started eating if enough people commented, and let's just say,
enough people commented. (slamming sounds) (chime dinging) For the past several months, I've been on this journey of inviting different breakfast
traditions into my home and into my habits, and that's a hard thing to do, but I've officially done it, and I want to share it with you. So I'm gonna share with you my top three non-American breakfast traditions. I wanna see in the comments if you have suggestions on other breakfast that I could try out that I'm
not mentioning here, okay? So leave those in the comments, for now, let's get into my
breakfast enlightenment. (chill out music) First up is Japanese. (chill out music) I went to Japan for
the first time in 2017, I was shooting an episode of Vox Borders, and I had just taken a 14-hour flight, I was totally delirious, I got off the flight, I met up with my fixer in Tokyo and it was morning time and she was like, "Do
you wanna get breakfast?" and I was like, "Yeah, sure." So we showed up to a
place called Yoshinoya. - [Yoshi] Yoshi! - I walk into this place, I have no idea what to order, and my fixer is like, "Don't worry, "I'll order you something." And she did, and before I knew it, out came a platter that looked like this. (chill out music) It came with rice, and miso soup, and a lightly grilled salted salmon and a raw egg. Yes, a raw egg. I kind of freaked out
when I saw the raw egg, I was like, why didn't they cook the egg, isn't there salmonella in this egg? Turns out in Japan,
they're just a lot better about cleanliness and quality
control on their eggs, not surprisingly, and because of that, they don't worry about salmonella like we do in the United States. So it turns out, you can eat a raw egg. And I did and this meal turned out to be one of the best meals of my life. I ate it every day during that trip. And here I am, three years later, trying to reform my breakfast, and where do I turn but this meal. (chill out music) Turns out, this meal is
called tamago kake gohan. Which basically means egg on rice, and it is a very simple,
traditional Japanese breakfast. To recreate this, I went to a wonderful
Japanese-Korean market near my home, and I went shopping for all of the goods. First thing I did was buy a rice cooker, I didn't have a rice cooker before, and I found out that a good rice cooker makes all of the difference. Second up, good salmon. I kind of just throw some soy sauce on the salmon, throw it in
the oven for 12 to 14 minutes, and then wrap it up and
put it in my refrigerator, and I eat it all week. So now my mornings with
Japanese breakfast mean washing some rice, throwing
it in the rice cooker, pulling it out 30 minutes later, and putting on a piece of
salmon, some sesame seed, sometimes an avocado,
oftentimes a lot of ginger, and all topped off with this amazing Hello Kitty branded soy sauce, that's like, kind of a morning
tamago kake gohan sauce that I found at this market. It is delicious. It is unbelievably delicious
to have rice in the morning, it's like salty, the salmon is salty, the ginger is amazing, I put seaweed in it sometimes, and I, like, when I'm eating that, I am just a happy happy human. I also make a big pot
of miso soup on Sundays, which is a very easy soup, you can throw, like, six
ingredients into a pot, let it sort of simmer for a bit, and then you have miso soup
for the rest of the week. Oh and for the raw egg,
I end up just taking a high-quality American raw egg and whipping it into the hot rice, and it's delicious and I've
been eating it for months now and I have not gotten sick, so you can do it too. This food is so good. Next up, let's talk
about Israel-Palestine. (chill out music) Okay, listen. Too much of my life has already
been spent in the comment section of videos, reading and responding
to comments on videos that I make about Israel-Palestine. Today, we're not talking
about the decades-old conflict where one asymmetrical
power is illegally occupying the other, ugh, jeeze,
see, you can't help it, you just, you can't help it. Anyway, today we're
talking about breakfast. I was in Jerusalem in 2016 reporting on the conflict, and I was meeting up with
an Israeli journalist who I had met online,
wanted to hang out with, she told me to come to a breakfast spot, so I navigated to the breakfast spot, I parked, and I looked, and I realized, it was a hummus restaurant. Hummus. For breakfast. I was little caught off-guard because in my mind,
hummus looked like this. It was always like the extra add-on that we would bring in a picnic and in short, I didn't understand hummus. During that trip, I had hummus
of all kinds for breakfast, in West Jerusalem, in East Jerusalem, with falafel, with toppings of different types of tahini, with mushrooms, oh man, and every hummus was different, and all of it was delicious. So fast forward three or four years and I'm in my breakfast crisis, I just genuinely do not want to wake up and consume dessert for breakfast. And I decided that hummus is something that I want to invite into my home. A little daunting, 'cause I was like, isn't hummus super complicated to make? Turns out, it's not. (chill out music) Hummus is effectively
just chickpeas and tahini, which is ground up sesame seed. You can soak your own chickpeas, which is incredibly cheap, or you can just buy
pre-soaked, canned chickpeas, however you wanna do it. Basically what you're doing is combining a bunch of ingredients into a blender, and just blending it up, and you have hummus and you have hummus for the entire week, and it is a perfect
platform to add anything to, I've been adding feta or an egg or pairing it with pickles
and beautiful bread, I even tried my hand at making
pita bread for the first time which is actually a pretty
simple, straightforward bread, I did it on a griddle
and in the oven, as well, both were fantastic, I mean, this is just amazing food
to have in the morning. It's smooth and light but
also creamy, for some reason, but it's not creamy like
it leaves you, like, wanting to take a nap,
it's just good food. And now I make a big pot of hummus at the beginning of the week, and we have it for the whole week, it stays good forever, not actually forever, doesn't
actually stay good forever, so, like, don't eat it after,
like, two, three months. Anyway, hummus is amazing. (chill out music) Okay so the last breakfast
I wanna talk about today comes from Texas, but really Mexico, I mean Texas was Mexico
and Mexico was Texas, and then the US stole it all, and anyway I'm making a video about that, but let's just talk about breakfast. (chill out music) Last year, we were at South,
in South West, in Austin, Iz was speaking, and I was just tagging along, and eating a million tacos. One morning, we walked
up to this taco truck. Vera Cruz all natural. Oof. Just saying the name makes my mouth water. Listen, I've eaten a
lot of tacos in my life. I lived in Northern Mexico for two years, I ate a lot of tacos,
I continue to eat tacos whenever I'm in that region, and yet this morning those tacos were some of the best tacos
I've ever had in my life. If not some of the best pieces of food I've ever consumed. The tacos at Vera Cruz
are called migas tacos, which is whipping scrambled
eggs with corn chips, like, crushed up corn chips, and they kind of soften but
they retain their crunch and they just make for
this delicious stuffing into a taco, you can also add all pastor, which is, like, pork, and oh, just delicious. It's usually topped with cilantro, onion, and of course, topped with your choice of delicious salsa. All of this wrapped in a freshly made thin but fatty flour tortilla. Flour tortilla, the key to
a delicious breakfast taco, is the flour tortilla. I'm a big fan of corn,
but a flour tortilla in the morning is just amazing. This food wakes you up, it fills you up, and
it just makes you happy to be alive when you're eating it. I know it sounds super dramatic, but I'm telling you, man, I have a very strong
affinity to breakfast tacos. Inviting this in my home
was not a hard thing to do because I've been making
Mexican-inspired food for many years, ever
since I lived in Mexico, and what I love about
it is it's simple food. It is eggs, and chips, and tortilla, and you could throw cheese on there, and an avocado. (chill out music) Okay, so those are my three
new staples in my life, Japanese, hummus, and breakfast tacos. I promised I'd tell you
which of these is my favorite and I have to say that
Japanese takes the cake. Cake. There's something about
having rice in the morning, it's just, it fills you up,
it stays with you for hours and I love breakfast. Never thought I'd say it but I
love freakin' love breakfast. So remember, if you haven't already, go in the comments and tell me if you have a non-American breakfast idea that I can start trying out in my life, give as much detail or a link as possible, I would love to see what other
people eat for breakfast, all of these ideas that I got came from just casual interactions with people who live in other countries who do have different breakfast paradigms and I hope that reading
through the comments I can get some more ideas. So thanks for watching. Hey, before you go, I want you to know about Squarespace who helps support and
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for sponsoring this video, and thank you all for watching, I'm just gonna keep making videos, and just, there's a lot of
stuff to make videos about, I probably should get back to it. So I'm just gonna get back to my computer and keep making videos, where's my computer? Anyone? Okay, see ya. (chill out music)
