Name: US vs UK Breakfast Foods | Food Wars | Insider Food
Uploaded: 2025-05-23T06:46:47.000Z
Duration: 35 min 54 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

We're exploring all the differences between breakfast in the U.K. and the U.S.

Obviously, portion sizes are difficult to quantify exactly because they vary wildly from restaurant to restaurant.

We're starting with what we think are classic cooked breakfast plates from each country.

This is the Set 1 breakfast from our local cafe.

For a classic American cooked breakfast, almost all diners will serve a 2x2x2, which contains two eggs, two pieces of bacon and two pancakes.

It's typical in the U.K. for cafes to have a set menu with pre-set breakfast options, and the Set 1 is usually the most standard.

This plate contains an egg, two pieces of bacon, a sausage, beans and a fried slice.

Yes, a fried slice is literally just a deep-fried slice of bread. It's delicious.

Let's measure some of these ingredients to see what the differences are.

Eggs don't always look quite as flat as this.

We'll weigh the whole plate and then deduct maybe like 10 grams for the weight of the paper plate.

So that entire breakfast plate comes out to 304 grams.

Let's take a look at some breakfast cereal portion sizes, starting with Kellogg's Corn Flakes.

The smallest one is this multi-pack 20 gram box.

Then we have a 250 gram box, a 450 gram box, and our biggest size, a 1 kilogram box.

You might also be able to find a 720 gram box, but we couldn't find it today.

U.S. Corn Flakes also come in a range of sizes.

We have the 9.6 ounce box, the 12 ounce box, the 18 ounce box, and the 24 ounce box.

There's also a mega size, which is 25.2 ounces.

In the U.S. we also have these little 2 ounce cereal cups.

These come in a lot of different kinds of cereal, but I couldn't find the Corn Flake one.

So that actually makes the U.K.'s largest size 40% bigger than the U.S.'s.

The only time we have a bigger portion size than America is when it's a healthy food, apparently.

There is an interesting difference when it comes to recommended serving sizes in the two countries.

In the U.S., the recommended serving size is 1 1⁄2 cups, which is 42 grams of Corn

The recommended serving size in the U.K. is just 30 grams, which is a 28% decrease compared to the U.S.

That means that the recommended serving size is bigger than one of these.

That also means that the largest U.S. box contains just 17 servings, while the U.K.'s contains 33.

That's almost double the number of portions if we're sticking to Kellogg's recommended amounts.

I'm going to measure out 30 grams because I'm kind of struggling to visualize what that actually looks like.

I don't know what they're recommending us, but that is not what I'm eating.

I'm having probably double that, I would say.

Let's measure out 42 grams of Corn Flakes.

Here's what 42 grams of cereal looks like.

I feel like this is a normal person's portion, for sure.

When I eat cereal, it's all about how I'm feeling.

Usually, it's probably twice the size of this.

I just feel like cereal's the kind of food where I just eat a lot of it.

This wouldn't do it for me, but it might do it for you.

I don't eat it out of normal people bowls.

Well, in the U.K., you can get Tropicana Orange Juice, and the biggest size is 1.5 liters.

In the U.S., our largest Tropicana size is 128 fluid ounces.

I'm no pulp, but I am kind of team some pulp sometimes.

You know, I'm feeling a little crazy, a little kooky.

First, we wanted to compare a couple of familiar options in both countries, because some of them actually have surprising differences.

The first thing I want to talk about is bacon.

Joe's always moaning about U.K. bacon, so I did some research and dug up some pretty interesting stuff.

I'm not impressed with your bacon here, guys.

Look at what American we're doing here, this is...

The most commonly eaten type of bacon in the U.K. is back bacon, which is identifiable by its shape.

You get the thick piece of pork at the top, with a fatty tail at the end.

Typically, our bacon is simply cured in a salted mixture, and can often be smoked with

We do also have streaky bacon, which more closely resembles the shape of American bacon, but is still quite different.

Bacon in the U.S. will almost always look like this.

Very thin piece of pork, fatty, usually has some crisp to it.

It depends on how you like it cooked, but if you order bacon here, this is what you're getting.

U.S. bacon is cut from a cured slab of pork belly.

Usually it'll be smoked with either applewood or hickory to add that smoky bacon flavor.

We cut our bacon from the pork loin, which is located on the back of the pig, hence the name back bacon.

The loin is a much less fatty cut of meat when compared to the belly.

This means that when it's cooked, less fat renders out of U.K. bacon, and it doesn't crisp up as much as American bacon tends to.

If there are any U.K.-based Americans watching this who miss American bacon, you can either seek out a butcher who is curing pork belly, or maybe just fry your back bacon in a bit more oil than you usually would.

I was always wondering what was going on with the U.K. bacon.

When you order breakfast at a U.S. diner, they will always ask you how you want your eggs, so you can get them scrambled, poached, boiled, fried.

If you want them fried, usually there's a list of ways you can get them fried.

So you can get them sunny side up, over easy, over medium, or over hard.

All of those options refer to whether you want your eggs flipped, plus how much you want the yolk to be cooked.

Sunny side up eggs are not flipped, meaning that the whites on top could be a little bit runny, and so will the yolk.

The yolk is, for the most part, uncooked.

Over easy eggs are flipped near the end to ensure that the whites are pretty much fully cooked on both sides, but the yolk should still be runny when you break into it.

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US vs UK Breakfast Foods | Food Wars | Insider Food

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