In Malaysia, a common breakfast is roti telur + teh tarik which is close to the dark breakfast region. It's like paratha, with an egg, and milk tea.
It is difficult to put milk into food. Why not just drink it? Alternatively, can we drink eggs and flour?
Cheese is another variation for milk. What about grilled cheese and eggs? Or some variation on Mac and Cheese?
You can also consider other dimensions like vegetables and spices. According to this plane, shakshuka is pure egg. Add spices to milk and you have chai. Add eggs to chai and you have cursed eggnog.
It wasn't just an omelette on top of a waffle (and both of them the size of a medium pizza). As you strayed from the edges toward the center it became difficult to see where the waffle ended and the omelette began.
Haha. I'd suggest that what's missing in the um "latent space" here, is that the triangle should be a pentagon involving some form of bacon/sausage, and some form of potato.
This cracked me up, because I had a fantastic dream the other night where I had a tour through a donut factory. But the best thing I had (in the dream) was something I'd never tried before, never seen, and which I intend to make at the earliest opportunity. It was slightly salty french fries, buttered and coated in sugar and cinnamon, like cinnamon toast. Bang on. Makes a lot of sense too, if you think about it. Definitely would fit in the "dark breakfast" polygon.
[edit] the potato and bacon theory also comes from what ends up deliciously mixed on your plate at the end, which along with syrup and ketchup is also an integral part of any egg/flour/milk breakfast.
Yeah meat is another dimension, as is potato. So we're up to 4 dimensional breakfast latent space. I hate to think what's in the dark breakfast black hole of that 4 dimensional latent space...
I feel like there's a lot of unexplored area in the carb-soaked-in-egg category that French Toast fits into. The major analogues being chiliqiles and matzoh brie. I recently did something like french toast bites where I cubed some sourdough bread, soaked it with egg and fried it up with small pieces of bacon mixed in. But what if you did that with a glazed donut? Or a waffle?
[edit] just also why this post touched my heart - I think form is as important as ingredients whenever you're dealing with relatively few ingredients. I have a breakfast I particularly love making that's just hash browns, egg and cheese. But the trick is, you griddle the hash browns, then flip them and smash them on griddled cheese, then crack an egg on top while the cheese fries and flip the whole thing again. The result is a crispy potato pancake where one side is fried cheese and the other is embedded fried egg. The same 3 ingredients, but it can be held in hand and it's got the perfect balance in each bite.
This is the kind of creative thinking that makes HN great. Using the framework of dark matter detection to explore unobserved breakfast possibilities is both hilarious and oddly rigorous. The breakfast phase space is clearly under-explored.
The concept of a 'Dark Breakfast Abyss' in the Breakfast Simplex is hilarious, but it got me thinking—maybe the reason we lack foods in that specific ratio of milk, flour, and eggs isn't because they'd destroy the world, but because they simply don't cook well conceptually. Like, an overly-battered omelette just turns into a gummy mess, not a crepe. It's fascinating how our culinary traditions naturally naturally sort themselves into these distinct mathematical vertices over centuries of trial and error.
The recipe at the end sounds a lot like the crepes I'd make in college. It was pre-WWW and I had no idea what I was doing but it seemed to work. The one thing I had going for me in college was a Costco membership. 25lb bags of flour, gallons of milk, and flats of eggs.. all cheap. I'd barter with roommates for crepe toppings (sour cream and jelly usually).
If you add baking powder and butter, that dark breakfast recipe is very close to crepes.
My crepe recipe - cook on medium heat pan:
Blend on low: 4 eggs- 3/4 cup whole milk, 1/2 stick of melted butter, and 1/4cup to 1/2 cup plain flower, 1 heaped tbsp of baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt, vanilla optional and to taste
Interesting, we could add in an 'arm' from the pancake local group, heading out from American pancakes, via traditional English pancakes (approx 1 cup of whole milk, 2 eggs, 3/4 cup of flour) to Crepes.
I guess the only difficulty there is we English don't eat those for breakfast, and really only make them on one day of the year. Which I missed this year!
Dammit, we're going to be having a belated pancake day here soon...
French toast isn't plotted because the recipe doesn't customarily start with flour, but if you do plot it it ends up in the lower middle. If you have exceptionally eggy challah, then you might be able to push it into the abyss, but really exceptionally eggy, like 1:1 egg to flour by weight.
That's because such breakfasts are forbidden by the Geneva Convention articles, section 23, subsection 8, paragraph 4. It's not one of the more well known provisions, but it does exist, and nobody wants to break international law.
In Malaysia, a common breakfast is roti telur + teh tarik which is close to the dark breakfast region. It's like paratha, with an egg, and milk tea.
It is difficult to put milk into food. Why not just drink it? Alternatively, can we drink eggs and flour?
Cheese is another variation for milk. What about grilled cheese and eggs? Or some variation on Mac and Cheese?
You can also consider other dimensions like vegetables and spices. According to this plane, shakshuka is pure egg. Add spices to milk and you have chai. Add eggs to chai and you have cursed eggnog.
Egg paratha is a common Indian dish. The dough can be made with flour and water, but is traditionally made with flour and milk.
https://www.thedeliciouscrescent.com/omelette-stuffed-parath...
This article doesn't do it justice, but the Womelette at the short-lived Royal Canadian Pancake House in NYC lived in the dark abyss.
https://www.eater.com/2015/1/26/7860903/amanda-cohen-royal-c...
It wasn't just an omelette on top of a waffle (and both of them the size of a medium pizza). As you strayed from the edges toward the center it became difficult to see where the waffle ended and the omelette began.
Such a shame they went out of business.
Aggakake or oeuf au lait.
3 eggs, 2 cups milk, 1 cup flour. Makes a nice flan/pudding consistency. Eggy and delicious.
Aggakake is on the chart!
Haha. I'd suggest that what's missing in the um "latent space" here, is that the triangle should be a pentagon involving some form of bacon/sausage, and some form of potato.
This cracked me up, because I had a fantastic dream the other night where I had a tour through a donut factory. But the best thing I had (in the dream) was something I'd never tried before, never seen, and which I intend to make at the earliest opportunity. It was slightly salty french fries, buttered and coated in sugar and cinnamon, like cinnamon toast. Bang on. Makes a lot of sense too, if you think about it. Definitely would fit in the "dark breakfast" polygon.
[edit] the potato and bacon theory also comes from what ends up deliciously mixed on your plate at the end, which along with syrup and ketchup is also an integral part of any egg/flour/milk breakfast.
Yeah meat is another dimension, as is potato. So we're up to 4 dimensional breakfast latent space. I hate to think what's in the dark breakfast black hole of that 4 dimensional latent space...
I feel like there's a lot of unexplored area in the carb-soaked-in-egg category that French Toast fits into. The major analogues being chiliqiles and matzoh brie. I recently did something like french toast bites where I cubed some sourdough bread, soaked it with egg and fried it up with small pieces of bacon mixed in. But what if you did that with a glazed donut? Or a waffle?
[edit] just also why this post touched my heart - I think form is as important as ingredients whenever you're dealing with relatively few ingredients. I have a breakfast I particularly love making that's just hash browns, egg and cheese. But the trick is, you griddle the hash browns, then flip them and smash them on griddled cheese, then crack an egg on top while the cheese fries and flip the whole thing again. The result is a crispy potato pancake where one side is fried cheese and the other is embedded fried egg. The same 3 ingredients, but it can be held in hand and it's got the perfect balance in each bite.
This is the kind of creative thinking that makes HN great. Using the framework of dark matter detection to explore unobserved breakfast possibilities is both hilarious and oddly rigorous. The breakfast phase space is clearly under-explored.
Salzburger Nockerln seems to fit in that area. https://www.austria.info/en-gb/recipes/salzburger-nockerl/
The concept of a 'Dark Breakfast Abyss' in the Breakfast Simplex is hilarious, but it got me thinking—maybe the reason we lack foods in that specific ratio of milk, flour, and eggs isn't because they'd destroy the world, but because they simply don't cook well conceptually. Like, an overly-battered omelette just turns into a gummy mess, not a crepe. It's fascinating how our culinary traditions naturally naturally sort themselves into these distinct mathematical vertices over centuries of trial and error.
The recipe at the end sounds a lot like the crepes I'd make in college. It was pre-WWW and I had no idea what I was doing but it seemed to work. The one thing I had going for me in college was a Costco membership. 25lb bags of flour, gallons of milk, and flats of eggs.. all cheap. I'd barter with roommates for crepe toppings (sour cream and jelly usually).
If you add baking powder and butter, that dark breakfast recipe is very close to crepes.
My crepe recipe - cook on medium heat pan:
Blend on low: 4 eggs- 3/4 cup whole milk, 1/2 stick of melted butter, and 1/4cup to 1/2 cup plain flower, 1 heaped tbsp of baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt, vanilla optional and to taste
Interesting, we could add in an 'arm' from the pancake local group, heading out from American pancakes, via traditional English pancakes (approx 1 cup of whole milk, 2 eggs, 3/4 cup of flour) to Crepes.
I guess the only difficulty there is we English don't eat those for breakfast, and really only make them on one day of the year. Which I missed this year!
Dammit, we're going to be having a belated pancake day here soon...
Looks like very close to the dark breakfast recipe
Love how at at the milk apex, there is cafe latte. Of course, it couldn't just be milk, perish the thought!
I suggest that the forbidden breakfast is tantamount to an eggs benedict, but with the hollandaise sauce replaced by a roux.
Even easier - egg sandwich using a basic milk bread.
If it's forbidden, it is rather "eggs interdict".
The eggs had better be deviled, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviled_egg
So eggs with white gravy? I think I’ve had that combo and it was pretty banging.
Add crawfish and you're really talkin
How about a Sauce Mornay?
béchamel (roux + milk) + egg yolks + cheese
What sort of projection is this that turns a 3-dimensional space into a triangle!
Fancy projection math is only for after coffee!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex
Common for visualizing mixtures of three things!
It's easy, if you normalize it so that it sums to one, it drops a dimension, and becomes an equilateral triangle.
Might choux hit that dark breakfast abyss? They aren't breakfast per se, but it might show that you can do things with those proportions.
This reminded me of <https://xkcd.com/2893/>.
What about french toast? I feel like there is a lot of egg in it, might place it near the bottom of the abyss.
French toast isn't plotted because the recipe doesn't customarily start with flour, but if you do plot it it ends up in the lower middle. If you have exceptionally eggy challah, then you might be able to push it into the abyss, but really exceptionally eggy, like 1:1 egg to flour by weight.
Breakfast is just generally milquetoast then?
Isn't it something like pancake with more eggs?
The real question is why this isn't already a dish.
I usually have egg on toast with plenty of butter. The combination sits squarely in the dark region I think.
I also get up early and it is often actually dark.
french toast was dismissed far too lightly, it's exactly what goes into the gap. also savoury bread pudding.
Congratulations. You've reinvented the souffle.
No mention of Eggs Florentine?
What about vegetable-forward breakfasts? Completely not on this chart.
That's because such breakfasts are forbidden by the Geneva Convention articles, section 23, subsection 8, paragraph 4. It's not one of the more well known provisions, but it does exist, and nobody wants to break international law.