I sympathize with the author, I've had similar thoughts about snacks. We need more non-sweet snacks. Ideally something that tastes good, is not too salty, is healthy and satisfies your cravings.
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.
Going against the spirit of TFA here, but I believe you can eat anything at any time of day, and my favorite breakfast tends to be regular food. Chili, soup, pasta, baked potatoes. Something warm, filling, and usually involving salt. I do sometimes have something more traditional, like oatmeal, but it's not as satisfying. I also sometimes have oatmeal as my final meal of the day if I'm hungry but already a bit tired, as it's more calm than something like spicy chili.
I really wonder why breakfast is the way it is, because since it's the first meal of the day, you'd think a big breakfast (e.g. dinner) would make sense as you need the calories during the (work)day. But maybe breakfast is relatively light because a lot of people have some digestive issues or sensitive stomachs in the mornings.
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.
Roti Telur is basically Egg Paratha. Indian migrants brought Paratha to Malaysia and Singapore, and it underwent some "localization" to suit the local palate, including being drenched in palm oil as it is cooked on the flat griddle. Sure fire way to clog your arteries, if eaten on a daily basis.
Someone else may have said this but strictly speaking breakfast is something like a cone in a vector space, unless you want to explain to me how to eat negative eggs.
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.
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...
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).
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.
Eastern European pan-fried cottage cheese fritters (mix and fry 150g cottage cheese, 5 tbsp flour, 1 egg, 3 tbsp sugar, salt) are great. That's all I have to say.
This whole thing is simply missing all milk based diary products like cheese, yogurt, white cheese, etc. When that is included then there is no gap or any mysterious quadrant.
While you are technically correct, since any triangle is a simplex, this is not relevant to this visualization.
For this visualization: get positive quantities in 3D space, normalize to 1, now you have dot on a triangle on 1-sphere in a positive octant. Project triangle into 2D space a this is your visualization.
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.
As a certified expert breakfast cook, I bristle at the idea that scrambled eggs includes any ingredient other than eggs or seasoning.
Also, while I know that omelette is technically the whipping of large amounts of air into what is otherwise scrambled eggs, it feels wrong to me that "omelette" is categorized as "pure egg singularity". Is an omelette worth the time and effort over scrambled eggs if it does not include bits of vegetables, meat, and/or cheese folded inside like a taco?
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.
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.
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.
Also, amazing article, haven't laughed that hard all day!
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.
https://www.thedeliciouscrescent.com/omelette-stuffed-parath...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_and_waffles
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.
[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.
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
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...
Breakfast burritos are also at least as important as quiche (as in, neither are as tasty without addins - just like omelettes).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviled_egg
béchamel (roux + milk) + egg yolks + cheese
Breakfast has way more dimensions.
My Egg McMuffin will never look the same!
Fancy projection math is only for after coffee!
Common for visualizing mixtures of three things!
For this visualization: get positive quantities in 3D space, normalize to 1, now you have dot on a triangle on 1-sphere in a positive octant. Project triangle into 2D space a this is your visualization.
3 eggs, 2 cups milk, 1 cup flour. Makes a nice flan/pudding consistency. Eggy and delicious.
Also, while I know that omelette is technically the whipping of large amounts of air into what is otherwise scrambled eggs, it feels wrong to me that "omelette" is categorized as "pure egg singularity". Is an omelette worth the time and effort over scrambled eggs if it does not include bits of vegetables, meat, and/or cheese folded inside like a taco?
I also get up early and it is often actually dark.
It’s a baked custard (so plenty of eggs) in a pie.
not sure the proportions match.
I was with you up to this point, but my suspension of disbelief has its limits.