Tackling better breakfasts

When did muesli become Bircher muesli? It’s in all the ‘healthy eating’ recipe books I’ve been consulting recently. It turns out it has always been called this. I remember the ‘muesli’ of my 1970s’ childhood – the orange box of Sainsbury’s Swiss Style Breakfast, the contents of which seemed to be a dusty mix of floury oats and few dried-out raisins. All my friends had Alpen, or so I thought.

The nearest I could find to vintage 1970s packaging - my Dad ate these, obviously no one was sad enough to photograph a muesli box...

 

I used to eat muesli every day, until I realised that I was very slightly lactose intolerant, and that couple with my desire to move towards the more vegan end of the spectrum, prompted me to give it up. Until recently though I hadn’t really been able to find any suitable replacement breakfast food and resorted to dunking processed, sugary Lu Breakfast Biscuits into my coffee in the French style.

Then I started to research the current clean-eating, plant-based eating fad/ food trend and noticed that every blogger, celebrity chef and recipe book was talking about Bircher Museli as if it was something new. In fact, muesli has been around since 1900 when Swiss physician Maximilian Bircher-Benner developed it for hospital patients. It’s based on raw oats, fruit and nuts. Bircher was an advocate of the raw food diet and himself became a vegetarian. His nutritional ideas were controversial at the time, but his ideas and diet were popular with the public.

The Original Bircher recipe

The original Bircher recipe contains: grated apples (including the skin and pips!), walnuts, almonds or hazelnuts, rolled oats soaked overnight in water, juice of half a lemon, cream and honey, or condensed milk.

One apple grated
One tbsp nuts
Three tbsp oats
Juice of half a lemon
One tbsp cream/milk/honey

Soak oats overnight (12 hours) in three tbsp of water, add the remaining ingredients before eating.

I am going to make some proper Bircher muesli soon, especially as I’ve started having a glass of warm water with lemon first thing, before breakfast (it’s an urban myth apparently, but I feel better). However, I have managed to cut out the Lu biscuits and replace them with a daily raw food granola bar and stir a teaspoon of chia seeds not my soya yoghurt. I’ve not managed to cut out the cup of coffee yet though.