Chef Martin Oswald and I work together inside The Habit Healers community on Skool, where we help people reverse insulin resistance. My Insulin Resistance Reversal Roadmap course lives there, along with Martin’s Healing Kitchen recipe vault, which keeps growing every week with new dishes and videos. I also go live every Tuesday at four PM Pacific for ninety minutes of coaching. Click here to learn more. I know what most people eat for breakfast. I used to eat it too. Cereal from a box, maybe some toast, maybe a banana sliced on top to make the whole thing feel like a responsible choice. And then ninety minutes later you’re starving again. Or worse, you’re not hungry exactly, but something feels off. You’re foggy and a little irritable and already eyeing the pantry for a snack you didn’t plan on eating. That mid-morning crash has very little to do with willpower. Your blood sugar just fell off a cliff, and breakfast pushed it off. Last week on our Wednesday live, Chef Martin Oswald showed everyone how to build a breakfast that avoids that cliff entirely. It takes about twenty minutes. And honestly, it changed what I’m putting on my own plate this week. The Breakfast Spectrum So Martin started the session by walking through breakfast foods ranked by how badly they spike your blood sugar, and I want to give you the rundown because I think it’s useful to see them stacked up next to each other. Cornflakes are the worst. In terms of how fast they hit your bloodstream, they’re basically pure sugar. Martin’s advice on what to do with that box of cheap cereal in your cabinet was to give it to the neighbor you don’t like, which, I mean, that’s one approach. White bread is almost as bad, and Martin made a good point about those classic American breakfast spots where everything on the plate looks beautiful and does absolutely nothing good for your metabolism. Potatoes with the skin on are better because the fiber slows things down. Kidney beans are better still. But tempeh is way down at the bottom of that spike spectrum. The fermentation gives it fiber, the protein is substantial, and you’re getting B vitamins and potassium and calcium without the saturated fat or cholesterol you’d get from animal sources. I knew tempeh was a good option, but I honestly hadn’t thought about where it lands relative to those other breakfast staples until Martin laid it out like that. A Chef Who Didn’t Like Tempeh Here’s the thing about Martin and tempeh. For years he didn’t eat it. He didn’t even put it on the menu at his bistro. Twenty years ago, the stuff you could buy was, in his words, basically all mushroom. The mycelium (that’s the white fungal network that binds the soybeans together during fermentation) overwhelmed everything else. It didn’t taste like food you’d choose to eat. It tasted like a science project. And I get that. Twenty years ago the options were limited and the product was, to put it kindly, an acquired taste. What changed is that producers got dramatically better at the inoculation process. The Rhizopus mold that ferments the soybeans gets introduced more precisely now, and the result is a product that’s firmer and meatier, with a lot more range in how you can cook with it. Martin compared it to what happened with craft breweries. One day there were a handful of options, and then seemingly overnight everyone was making their own version. The competition pushed everything forward. My son actually went to Thailand to learn how to make tempeh from scratch. He came back saying that freshly made tempeh tastes completely different from the store-bought version, and I believe it. The fermentation takes about 48 hours, and the soybeans get bound together by that mycelium network into something that honestly has the texture of chicken. I don’t mean sort of close. If you close your eyes and chew, the mouthfeel is remarkably similar. Martin used to hunt mushrooms in Colorado (he still gets excited about it, you can tell) and spent years watching mycelium spread across forest floors. He’s read that mycelium may be the largest organism on the planet, because those networks can stretch for miles underground. He made the observation during the live that the same organism holding the forest together is also the thing holding his breakfast together, which got a good laugh. And tempeh doesn’t have to be soybeans, either. Martin showed a black bean version and one with Mexican-inspired seasoning that had cumin and chipotle built right in. You can find pre-seasoned varieties at most grocery stores now. Or you can start with a plain organic block and do what Martin did, which is season it yourself. The Cooking Rule Nobody Follows The recipe itself is short. Tempeh cut into bite-sized pieces, marinated in a splash of soy sauce and some lemon juice (tamari works if you’re avoiding gluten), then crisped in a ceramic pan with about a teaspoon of olive oil. But the part that I think will actually change how some of you cook happened when Martin put the tempeh in the pan, stepped back, and said three words. Don’t touch it. I know. Your instinct is to stir. Everyone’s instinct is to stir. But there’s real food science behind why you shouldn’t. When something goes into a hot pan, the moisture inside the food starts pushing upward as steam. If you leave it alone, the bottom surface dries out, browns through what’s called the Maillard reaction, and eventually releases from the pan on its own. If you stir too early, before that browning happens, it sticks. Every beginner cook knows that frustration of putting food in the pan and immediately poking at it and wondering why everything is glued to the surface. That’s why. I compared it to making pancakes, where you wait for the bubbles to stop before you flip. Martin said yes, but the bubbles aren’t actually doing the work. They’re just telling you the moisture is steaming out. Underneath, the Maillard reaction is creating flavor and color, and once that browning is complete, the food lifts away from the pan almost by itself. It works for pretty much anything you’re searing. Tempeh, tofu, vegetables. Get it in the pan and leave it alone. The heat will handle the rest. At one point Martin grabbed a piece of hot tempeh with his bare fingers and I told him he clearly has no feelings in his hands. His response was that his wife would say he has no feelings at all. Carol, if you’re watching, I’m sure that’s not entirely accurate. The Number That Actually Matters While Martin’s tempeh was crisping (and I was under strict orders not to touch it), I jumped in to talk about something that I think confuses a lot of people when they’re trying to make smarter food choices. Most people have heard of the glycemic index. Fewer people know about the glycemic load. The glycemic index tells you how fast a food will spike your blood sugar. It’s measured on a scale from zero to 100, based on a standard 50-gram serving of digestible carbohydrates. Pure glucose is 100. But the glycemic index by itself can be misleading. It doesn’t account for how much of that food you’d actually eat in a normal sitting. That’s what the glycemic load does. It takes the speed of the spike and combines it with how many carbs are in a real-world serving. The formula is pretty simple. Glycemic index times grams of carbohydrate per serving, divided by 100. Watermelon is my favorite example. Glycemic index of 72, which looks terrible. But a typical serving has very little carbohydrate, so the glycemic load is only about four. (I’ll be honest, I personally eat way more than a “typical serving” of watermelon. I can demolish an entire one when they’re in season. But the point holds.) Quick reference if you want it. Glycemic index under 55 is low, 55 to 69 is medium, above 72 is high. Glycemic load under 10 is low, 11 to 19 is medium, above 20 is high. The tempeh breakfast Martin was making would land squarely at the low end of both scales, which is exactly where you want to be. Water Sauteing and the Tomato Trick Once the tempeh was crisped and set aside, Martin built the vegetable side in the same pan. Cauliflower first because it takes the longest to cook and he wanted it to pick up a little color. Then the onions, mushrooms, and peppers went in on top. Now, instead of pouring in more oil (which is what most restaurant kitchens would do, and honestly what most of us do at home without thinking about it), Martin added about three tablespoons of water. That’s it. He calls it water sauteing. The veggies steam in their own moisture plus that small splash of liquid, and you skip all the extra calories from oil. Martin made the point that professional kitchens pour oil with a heavy hand because it makes everything taste rich, and the customer doesn’t realize how much went in until after the meal when they feel uncomfortably full. I thought about that for a minute and it’s absolutely true. Then Sherry, one of our regular viewers, said something in the chat that I want to highlight. She said the next tip was worth the whole session. Instead of adding nut butter for moisture and richness (something Martin normally does, and which is perfectly fine if you’re at a comfortable weight), he used a single chopped tomato. Just one. It creates enough moisture to keep the dish from drying out without making it soupy, and you avoid the 200 to 300 extra calories from cashew or almond butter. If weight management is part of your picture right now, especially heading into summer, that swap is worth trying. After the tomato, Martin added chopped garlic and cooked it just until the raw sulfuric smell shifted to something sweet, about a minute or two. Then he roasted his spice blend in the pan. The blend has cumin, smoked paprika, black pepper, and fenugreek, which Martin said has shown up in blood sugar management research he’s been following. His full blend is o
