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This Bacon and Cheese Muffin Eats Like a Meal—Morning, Noon, or Night

Amanda Frederickson’s breakfast muffins with bacon.

This Bacon and Cheese Muffin Eats Like a Meal—Morning, Noon, or Night
Bacon-topped muffins, from Simple Beautiful Food. (Photographer: Amanda Frederickson)

Editor’s Note: As more people are working from home, Bloomberg Pursuits is running a weekly Lunch Break column that highlights a notable recipe from a new cookbook and the hack that makes it genius. 

The term “fridge-foraging” sounds like an idea that an enterprising person came up with after one too many loaves of banana bread in the middle of the pandemic.

In fact, Amanda Frederickson came up with the concept three years before the Covid-19 coronavirus forced people around the world to become more resourceful in their home kitchens. She’s been featuring #fridgeforaging every Wednesday on her social media since March 2017.

This Bacon and Cheese Muffin Eats Like a Meal—Morning, Noon, or Night

On the designated day, Frederickson goes through the ingredients in her refrigerator and pantry, and viewers vote on what dish she will prepare. The food writer and tester introduced it as a way to fight food waste and unnecessary trips to multiple stores. “Looking at the media landscape, I saw so much waste. I hated going to eight different stores—and all the food that gets thrown out—when there’s so much hunger,” she says.

During the pandemic, Frederickson saw a 50% uptick in engagement. “Especially at the beginning, there was a real interest in how to fridge-forage in your kitchen. I compare it to a muscle memory; you become very aware of pantry staples like bread, beans.”

This Bacon and Cheese Muffin Eats Like a Meal—Morning, Noon, or Night

Frederickson’s new cookbook isn’t called “fridge-foraging.” It’s Simple Beautiful Food: Recipes and Riffs for Everyday Cooking (Ten Speed Press; $22). Before she started excavating her fridge, Frederickson worked in the Williams-Sonoma test kitchen on product-recipe development. The job made her hyper-aware of the appeal of good-looking food. “You always think about how food would taste and how it would photograph.”

Case in point: her breakfast muffins with bacon. Usually, muffins are sweet, but Frederickson hacks her recipe by adding bacon for a dish you can eat all day, whether it’s for breakfast or as a side for a grilled- or roasted-meat dinner.

The recipe stays true to the title because, along with the unstoppable combination of bacon and cheese, Frederickson adds sliced scallions for color. She also sprinkles extra Cheddar before baking to create a compelling melted crown of cheese. “In general, muffins look one-dimensional; scallions make them more interesting, visually.”

This Bacon and Cheese Muffin Eats Like a Meal—Morning, Noon, or Night

A further bonus for these tender, bacon-stuffed muffins is that they’re low-maintenance, which makes them especially appealing for a socially distanced summer picnic. “These muffins are self-contained: You don’t need a plate, or a fork, or almost anything,” says Frederickson, who just opened her first restaurant, the fast-casual Radish Kitchen, in Nashville this week.

They still fulfill her #fridgeforaging mantra. I found that the only thing I needed to buy to make them was buttermilk. All the other ingredients—vegetable oil, sugar, salt, flour, baking soda, baking powder, cheese, and eggs—were in my kitchen, waiting to be used.

Testing note. These muffins taste the very best when the bacon is warm (i.e., when they’re freshly baked). If you make them for breakfast or brunch, you can cook the bacon in advance, or use leftover bacon and then bake in the morning. Still, you won’t be sad eating them at room temperature.

The following recipe is adapted from Simple Beautiful Food from Amanda Frederickson and Ten Speed Press.

Breakfast Bacon Muffins

This Bacon and Cheese Muffin Eats Like a Meal—Morning, Noon, or Night

Makes 10 muffins

6 bacon strips, chopped
Vegetable oil, if necessary
1 1⁄2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. sugar
1⁄2 tsp. salt
2  cups grated sharp Cheddar cheese (about ½ lb.)
1⁄3 cup thinly sliced scallions
1 cup buttermilk
1 large egg

This Bacon and Cheese Muffin Eats Like a Meal—Morning, Noon, or Night

Preheat the oven to 425F. Line a muffin pan with paper liners or arrange silicon muffin cups on a baking sheet.

Cook the bacon in a large skillet over medium heat until crisp, about 6 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer to a paper towel-lined plate. Reserve 1⁄4 cup of bacon fat; if necessary add vegetable oil to get to a quarter of a cup. In a medium bowl, mix the flour with the baking powder, baking soda, sugar, salt, 1 1⁄2 cups of the grated cheese, scallions, and the cooked bacon.

In a small bowl, combine the buttermilk, egg, and bacon fat. Mix into the dry ingredients until just combined. Scoop the batter into the prepared muffin pan and sprinkle the tops with the remaining 1⁄2 cup grated cheese.

Bake the muffins for 15 to 18 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into a muffin comes out clean and the tops are golden brown. Serve warm.

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