- Elimination
- Reintroduction
- Maintenance
- Breakfast
- Lunch
Baked Eggs with Spinach and Feta
Elimination breakfasts collapse into oats within a fortnight. This is the savoury one that holds up, and the oven does almost all of it.
- Prep
- 5 min
- Cook
- 15 min
- Total
- 20 min
- Serves
- 2
Published
Ingredients
Makes 2 servings. Each ingredient is labelled with its FODMAP status at this quantity.
- Low FODMAP
4 eggs
FODMAP-free at any quantity.
- Portion-dependent
150 g baby spinach
Low FODMAP at 75 g per serve. It wilts to almost nothing, so weigh it raw.
- Portion-dependent
80 g feta, crumbled
Low FODMAP at 40 g per serve. Firm Greek-style feta, not a soft spreadable one.
- Low FODMAP
2 tbsp garlic-infused olive oil
Fructans are water-soluble and do not migrate into oil, so the flavour comes across and the trigger does not.
- Portion-dependent
2 common tomatoes, roughly chopped
Low FODMAP at one medium tomato per serve.
- Low FODMAP
1/4 tsp chilli flakes
- Low FODMAP
2 tsp fresh thyme leaves, or 1 tsp dried
- Low FODMAP
to taste salt and black pepper
- Low FODMAP
4 slices gluten-free or spelt sourdough bread, to serve
Spelt sourdough is low FODMAP at 2 slices — the long ferment breaks down most of the fructans.
What the labels mean
- Low FODMAPSafe at the serving size listed.
- Portion-dependentLow FODMAP only up to the serving size listed — larger servings stack.
Method
Step 1: Heat the oven to 200°C / 400°F fan. Put an ovenproof skillet over a medium hob heat with the garlic-infused oil.
Step 2: Add the chopped tomatoes, thyme and chilli flakes and cook for 4 to 5 minutes, pressing the tomatoes with the back of a spoon until they slump into a loose sauce.
Step 3: Add the spinach a large handful at a time, turning it through the tomato until each addition collapses before adding the next. Season well — spinach absorbs a surprising amount of salt.
Step 4: Make four shallow wells in the mixture with the back of a spoon. Crack an egg into each and scatter the feta into the gaps between them.
Step 5: Bake for 8 to 10 minutes, until the whites are just set and the yolks still move when you shake the pan. Serve straight from the skillet with the toast.
Notes and swaps
- Take the pan out when the whites look barely done. Residual heat in cast iron will carry the yolks past runny in under a minute.
- Weigh the spinach raw. Cooked down it looks like a fraction of a serving and it is very easy to talk yourself into a third handful.
- For a version that reheats well, skip the eggs, refrigerate the tomato and spinach base for up to three days, and crack fresh eggs into a reheated portion.
By the second week of elimination, most people have worked out that breakfast is the meal the diet hits hardest. Cereal is out, most breads are out, and the savoury options that survive — eggs, essentially — get boring fast when the only thing you are allowed to do with them is scramble them plain.
The problem is not the eggs. It is that every technique you would normally reach for to make eggs interesting starts with onion or garlic.
Where the flavour comes from instead
Three things carry this dish, and none of them is allium.
The first is the garlic-infused oil, which does the aromatic work in the first minute of cooking. The second is the tomato, cooked hard enough to break down and concentrate rather than just warmed through — that is where the savoury depth comes from, and it is why the recipe asks you to press the tomatoes with a spoon rather than leave them in neat pieces. The third is the feta, which is doing the job salt alone cannot: it adds sharpness and a fermented tang that reads as complexity.
The spinach arithmetic
Spinach is the ingredient people get wrong here, and always in the same direction.
Baby spinach is low FODMAP at 75 g per serving, which sounds enormous when you are holding raw leaves and looks like nothing once it has wilted. A 150 g bag — the standard supermarket size — is exactly two servings. The recipe is built around that bag deliberately, so the arithmetic is done for you as long as you split the pan between two people.
If you cook the whole bag and eat the whole pan, you have had a double serving of spinach, roughly 80 g of feta and two tomatoes in one sitting. Individually all three are fine. Stacked, they are a plausible reason to have a bad afternoon and no obvious culprit.
On the toast
Bread is the other place this meal can quietly go wrong. Ordinary wheat bread is high in fructans and out during elimination. Two options work: a certified gluten-free loaf, or genuine spelt sourdough, which is low FODMAP at two slices because the long fermentation breaks down most of the fructans before you ever eat it.
The word doing the work there is genuine. A great deal of supermarket “sourdough” is ordinary yeasted bread with added acidity for flavour, produced on a timescale that ferments nothing. If the ingredients list yeast, it is not going to help you.
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