The Hunt for Dark Breakfast

Please allow me to introuce you to the sri lankan egg hopper (https://www.lavenderandlovage.com/2016/05/sri-lankan-egg-hop...) which lives squarely in the aforementioned dark abyss.

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.

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.

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.

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

It has been speculated that over half of the breakfast in the universe is dark breakfast.

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.

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).

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.

Love how at at the milk apex, there is cafe latte. Of course, it couldn't just be milk, perish the thought!

My breakfast recipe this morning, thanks to this article:

- 1/4 c. milk

- 1/2 c. flour

- 4 eggs

- 1/3 c. sugar

- some salt

- cinnamon

- cloves

- nutmeg

- poppyseeds

Did the first two cakes without baking powder, turned into something between a crepe and a tortilla. Did the last two cakes with baking powder and they were just a very squishy pancake.

Salzburger Nockerln seems to fit in that area. https://www.austria.info/en-gb/recipes/salzburger-nockerl/

I feel like excluding French toast is a serious faux pas here!

Breakfast burritos are also at least as important as quiche (as in, neither are as tasty without addins - just like omelettes).

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.

I suggest that the forbidden breakfast is tantamount to an eggs benedict, but with the hollandaise sauce replaced by a roux.

I think it would make sense to include pudding - it's basically milk with a bit of flour. It's important to include because it shows that there are foods beyond Pancake Local Group that aren't just liquid milk.

One important property of pudding is that unlike pancakes, the space of pudding isn't "chaotic and fractal" because whether you add just enough flour to make it somewhat sticky or so much that you can cut it with a knife, it's still pudding. This means that if we take flour-heavy pudding and somehow add shitload of eggs, we should be able to venture into the Dark Breakfast area. I have a pudding recipe that calls for egg yolks, but I feel like this isn't a good lead. Still it proves further how flexible "pudding" is.

Going back to pancakes, there's one funny variation. "Naleśniki" with cottage cheese and cream (or yoghurt). Cottage cheese and cream are basically milk with extra steps, which means that the entire dish becomes mainly milk. This means that the Pancake Local Group actually stretches much closer to the "milk" vertex than your diagram suggests.

If I were to prepare something that passes as food and sits in the Dark Breakfast Abyss, I'd try scrambled eggs on the thinnest bread I could reasonably make. Something like "scrambled eggs taco".

A soufflé would fit some of the void. It has some flour in the bechamel.. whipped egg whites etc.

While a delightfully funny article it also touches on something I’ve thought about many times before: just how uniform basically 99% of all (American) restaurant breakfast menus are. It’s really quite extraordinary in some ways how these menus are nearly entirely interchangeable from on to another. They might have very small tweaks and of course the ingredient specifics aren’t exact (specific butter brands, slight proportion differences)but by and large you could predict with almost perfect accuracy every single item that a typical breakfast menu in the US might have.

And I feel like that’s really a missed opportunity? Like even recognizing that of all meals breakfast is the most “comforting” and the one most likely for customers to want familiar, at the same time there are so many unexplored variants using the same ingredients (as this article shows!) that almost no restaurants will ever experiment with or offer. Lunch and dinner menus have massive variation in comparison!

This is amazing - and somehow channels both Douglas Adams and Randall Munroe at the same time...

What sort of projection is this that turns a 3-dimensional space into a triangle!

Fancy projection math is only for after coffee!

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?

Posts like this are why I read Hacker News.

My Egg McMuffin will never look the same!

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.

Aggakake or oeuf au lait.

3 eggs, 2 cups milk, 1 cup flour. Makes a nice flan/pudding consistency. Eggy and delicious.

This is the greatest text I have read in the last 10 years, it kept getting better as it went along.

Surprised not to see “breakfast pasta” aka Carbonara. Wheat in the noodles, egg and cheese sauce.

Is the "Dutch Baby" in the pancake group some alternative name for "flensjes" that I'm not familiar with? It's a thin dessert variation of Dutch pancakes that has relatively high egg and milk ratios compared to flour.

Congratulations. You've reinvented the souffle.

"IHOP Transgression" cracked me up. There's a restaurant in my town that does the same thing and I hate them for that reason. And like IHOP, what they call an omelette is actually a frittata.

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 would be remiss not to also mention The Cube Rule

https://cuberule.com/

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.

Isn't it something like pancake with more eggs?

An omelet wrapped in a paratha with a caffe latte to drink looks like the obvious answer... You can also play with the crust to filling ratio of a quiche...

How about doughnut with just the right amount of custard filling? Or perhaps a brioche with the right amount of French vanilla ice cream/gelato? A classic egg and cheese sandwich in your desired proportions?

I love the idea and the writing, but the execution seems off. Cake has a very well-defined spot and Weetabix doesn’t? More work needed

The Irish full breakfast (fry up) includes soda bread, often fresh baked. That with the eggs likely puts it in the "Dark Breakfast" sector. Other sorts of full breakfast may also end up there, there's no true fixed set of ingredients in a full breakfast so any egg-heavy variety can end up in the "dark" sector.

Breakfast is just generally milquetoast then?

What about french toast? I feel like there is a lot of egg in it, might place it near the bottom of the abyss.

You can tell a non-US-southerner wrote this because there's not a biscuit to be had here.

WHERE ARE THE BISCUITS???