Christmas Morning Baked Eggs With Vegan Nduja

Method

1. Warm the olive oil in a wide ovenproof frying pan over medium heat.
2. Add the onion and capsicum with a pinch of salt and cook for 10 minutes, stirring now and then, until soft and slumped rather than coloured.
3. Add the garlic, or the garlic salt flakes, and cook for 1 minute.
4. Turn the heat to low, add the Ve-du-ya and press it into the oil for about 2 minutes, until it loosens and the oil around it turns deep red. Chilli paste boiled hard turns bitter, so keep the heat gentle.
5. Pour in the sughi, swill the water around the empty jar and add that too.
6. Simmer uncovered for 15 minutes, until a spoon dragged across the base leaves a line that holds for a second.
7. Taste, season, and stir in the sugar only if the tomatoes taste sharp.
8. Let the sauce cool, then cover the pan and refrigerate it overnight.
9. In the morning, heat the oven to 200°C, or 180°C fan-forced, and take the eggs out of the fridge.
10. Warm the sauce on the stove over medium heat for about 5 minutes, until it bubbles at the edges. Cold sauce is the main reason baked eggs take twice as long as the recipe says.
11. Loosen it with a splash of water if it has stiffened overnight. It should be spoonable and about 2 to 3cm deep.
12. Make six evenly spaced wells with the back of a spoon, scraping each one down to the base of the pan so the whites sit in the well rather than spreading over the top.
13. Crack each egg into a cup first, then tip it into a well. A shell fragment is far harder to find in tomato sauce than in a cup.
14. Season the yolks lightly, scatter the feta between the eggs and spoon the yoghurt into the gaps.
15. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until the whites are just set and the yolks still wobble when you nudge the pan.
16. Rest the pan for 2 minutes out of the oven, because the whites keep firming in the hot sauce.
17. Tear the herbs over, add a thread of olive oil, and put the bagel toast on the table with it.

Make ahead, and the leftover sauce

The sauce keeps three days in the fridge and three months in the freezer, so double it in early December and freeze half flat in a bag. It thaws in a sink of warm water in about twenty minutes. Sauce with no eggs in it is the useful leftover: it dresses pasta, sits under white fish, or goes on toast with a fried egg. If the morning will be busier than this, our Christmas breakfast ideas you can set out in ten minutes covers the version with no cooking at all, and our guide to Christmas food in Australia sets out what to buy when.

Questions we get asked

What is nduja and what do you use it for?

Nduja, said roughly as en-doo-ya, is a soft Calabrian cured pork paste with a lot of chilli in it, spreadable rather than sliceable. It is a flavour base more than a topping: melted into oil at the start of a sauce, spread thinly on toast under a poached egg, or dotted over a pizza before it bakes. Ve-du-ya is Belazu's vegan version, built on peppers, and it does those jobs without the pork.

Can you make baked eggs ahead of time?

The sauce, yes, and you should: it is better on the second day, and having it ready is what turns this into a fifteen minute breakfast. The eggs, no. Baked eggs do not reheat. The yolk sets hard and greys at the edge and the white goes rubbery, so crack in only as many as people will eat.

What is a good vegetarian Christmas breakfast?

One dish everyone eats, rather than a separate plate for the vegetarian. Baked eggs in a spiced tomato sauce does that, and so does a board of pastries, cheese and fruit with a bowl of yoghurt. Check the flavour base rather than the headline: a tomato sauce is usually fine, a chilli paste often is not, since traditional nduja and several others carry meat or fish. Our vegetarian range is filtered for that, and the label on the jar is the final word.

One jar, several breakfasts

A 170g jar of Ve-du-ya is $13.95 and this pan uses about a third of it. The rest of the Belazu range works the same way, jars that do a job rather than sit unopened in the fridge door. Shipping is free Australia-wide on orders over $100. Orders placed before 12pm on a weekday are dispatched the same day from our Corio, VIC warehouse, tracked with Australia Post. To send the jars to someone else's Christmas morning, they turn up packed inside our Christmas hampers.