Padma Lakshmi Just Made Her Favorite Snack in a Soothing ASMR Video—and We Have the Recipe
If you need some soft whispers and crackling crunches to get you through the night, Padma Lakshmi has some content that may interest you. In an Instagram post from this weekend, Lakshmi revealed her "most favorite snack"—a piece of toast with a smear of creamy peanut butter and some pomegranate seeds on top—in a soothing mix of mukbang and ASMR.
It's the same delicious snack Lakshmi shared when she guest-edited the October 2021 issue of EatingWell magazine, and it's so tasty we ended up developing recipes for other simple toasts just like it, including this Pecan Butter & Pear Toast and our Cashew Butter & Clementine Toast.
While our toast recipes use toasted whole-grain bread for a healthful boost (Did you know whole grains are the best food for heart health?), whatever bread you have on hand works. "I got this bread from Daily Provisions," Lakshmi says of her own loaf in the video. "It's a seeded sourdough." While that particular Daily Provisions bread is just available to those in New York City, you could always pick up a loaf at your local bakery or try our Whole-Wheat Sourdough Bread for a baking project.
Related: What Padma Lakshmi Eats in a Day
Lakshmi also opts for classic Jif creamy peanut butter in her video, while our recipe opts for smooth natural peanut butter. Natural peanut butter is nuttier, full of healthy fats and likely to contain less sugar, as we reported in 2014. (That's why we put it to delicious use in recipes like our Peanut Butter Energy Balls and Banana Protein Muffins.) Just make sure you give your jar of natural nut butter a good stir, since it may separate more than the processed kind.
If you stick to the recipe Padma shared with us, this quick five-minute breakfast is a low-calorie, heart-healthy option that has a little fiber and protein for staying power throughout the day. And if you keep peanut butter and whole-wheat bread around, it's an easy pantry breakfast that has all the flavor of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with the added bonus of juicy fresh fruit. Keep in mind that if you opt for sourdough bread and processed peanut butter, you'll end up with different nutritional values.
In her caption, Lakshmi shared that she was eating "the last pomegranates of the season," since North American pomegranates are normally harvested from mid-September to early January, according to Minneopa Orchards. If you can't find pomegranates at your grocery store, you could swap in some roasted grapes (like we do in this recipe) for a similarly fruity flavor. A commenter suggested swapping in blackberries with mint, basil or sage—which means we could enjoy this breakfast during the summer months, too.
No matter how you top your toast, treating yourself to a nice loaf of bread and enjoying your breakfast under the sunny morning sky sounds like a good move to us.