[HN Gopher] The Hunt for Dark Breakfast
___________________________________________________________________
The Hunt for Dark Breakfast
Author : moultano
Score : 513 points
Date : 2026-02-27 03:49 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (moultano.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (moultano.wordpress.com)
| kibwen wrote:
| I suggest that the forbidden breakfast is tantamount to an eggs
| benedict, but with the hollandaise sauce replaced by a roux.
| koolba wrote:
| So eggs with white gravy? I think I've had that combo and it
| was pretty banging.
| kazinator wrote:
| If it's forbidden, it is rather "eggs interdict".
| kijin wrote:
| The eggs had better be deviled, too.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviled_egg
| kazinator wrote:
| Vile eggs need de-viling, otherwise not.
| noduerme wrote:
| Add crawfish and you're really talkin
| Bjartr wrote:
| How about a Sauce Mornay?
|
| bechamel (roux + milk) + egg yolks + cheese
| 3RTB297 wrote:
| Even easier - egg sandwich using a basic milk bread.
| lambda wrote:
| Oh, I do frequently have biscuits and gravy topped with fried
| eggs, though the biscuits and gravy would definitely pull it
| further towards the flour end of the spectrum, maybe not quite
| in the dark region.
|
| Also, hollandaise is pretty integral to eggs benedict, I've had
| lots of variations but the traditional with poached egg,
| canadian bacon, english muffin, and hollandaise is really by
| far the best.
| josephjeon wrote:
| Isn't it something like pancake with more eggs?
| muzani wrote:
| The real question is why this isn't already a dish.
| kazinator wrote:
| Love how at at the milk apex, there is cafe latte. Of course, it
| couldn't just be milk, perish the thought!
| scythe wrote:
| Have to wonder if yogurt counts, since I've had that for
| breakfast many more times than just milk or a latte
| hspeiser wrote:
| What about french toast? I feel like there is a lot of egg in it,
| might place it near the bottom of the abyss.
| moultano wrote:
| 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.
| dheera wrote:
| What about vegetable-forward breakfasts? Completely not on this
| chart.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| lucianbr wrote:
| > nobody wants to break international law
|
| I was with you up to this point, but my suspension of
| disbelief has its limits.
| kenty wrote:
| Dietary fiber is clearly off charts for OP.
| abakker wrote:
| 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
| josephjeon wrote:
| Looks like very close to the dark breakfast recipe
| Nursie wrote:
| 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...
| xen0 wrote:
| As an Englishman that has been transplanted to another
| country, I find myself making them more in Germany than I
| ever made them back home.
|
| But that's because my wife requests it.
|
| It would never occur to me to up the egg ratio so high to
| reach into that void though. My wife manages to mess up the
| proportions every time though, so maybe we'll unwittingly
| explore that region one day.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| kfarr wrote:
| 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...
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| deinonychus wrote:
| you can just french toast anything you have laying around
| in your fridge or kitchen. they can't stop you.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB42iztkzVQ
|
| i've done the french toast pizza and it wasn't bad. not
| sure if it was worth the effort. maybe there's an ideal
| type of pizza or combo of toppings that makes this
| spectacular. either way it's worth trying once just to say
| you did.
| tenthirtyam wrote:
| I'd add oil as another dimension - sunflower oil, olive oil,
| butter, lard, whatever.
| ekidd wrote:
| > _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._
|
| The closest existing food I know to this are churros, which can
| be truly excellent when made well. In places like Barcelona,
| they dip them in chocolate sauce.
|
| I support your experiments in potato-based churro analogs!
| mylifeandtimes wrote:
| so, a pentagon, you say. hmmm. Yes, or more properly a
| pentacle, a protective glyph around the sacred meal.
|
| yes, a much better vector space. Thank you, Noduerme, you are
| one of the faithful.
| dnpls wrote:
| Isn't a basic souffle gonna fall somewhere in the dark
| breakfast territory?
| heeen2 wrote:
| theres a japanese recipe for fried sweet potatoes with brown
| sugar/caramel sauce
|
| https://www.okonomikitchen.com/daigaku-imo-japanese-candied-...
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| What sort of projection is this that turns a 3-dimensional space
| into a triangle!
|
| Fancy projection math is only for after coffee!
| jonahx wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex
|
| Common for visualizing mixtures of three things!
| vl wrote:
| 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.
| Paracompact wrote:
| 2-sphere, I believe you mean to say.
| moultano wrote:
| It's easy, if you normalize it so that it sums to one, it drops
| a dimension, and becomes an equilateral triangle.
| JackFr wrote:
| 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.
| mikestorrent wrote:
| This is fantastic, I'm dying to eat a Womelette.
| khafra wrote:
| Blending an omelette and a waffle should be totally doable;
| I've made waffle frittatas before and they turned out great.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| It sounds like you're kind of a little up and to the right of
| the Ugandan Rolex[1]. This sounds like some hideous method of
| gangland killing, but is in fact a tomato omelette rolled up
| in a big fresh chapati. Nothing to stop you using any other
| variety of omelette and indeed I've had excellent results
| with cheese ones.
|
| [1] https://www.theregister.com/2015/08/23/post_pub_nosh_ugan
| dan...
| randallsquared wrote:
| The article you linked claims "any type of omelette", but the
| vast majority of omelettes[*] are semicircles, not circular,
| right? You'd have to cook the top and bottom separately or
| mostly separately to get a circular one. Hm.
|
| [*] of course, here I mean proper omelettes, which are an egg
| shell around ingredients, _not_ scrambled eggs with ingredients
| mixed in.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| In my experience if they're semicircular it's because they're
| folded over on themselves. Not sure what that has to do with
| cooking (or not) both sides.
|
| Your ingredient mixing distinction doesn't reflect what I've
| encountered. That seems to have more to do with the nature of
| a given ingredient or alternatively with presentation or
| other concerns specific to a given recipe.
|
| Yeah if you wanted "cooked separately and also circular"
| you'd need to make a two omelette sandwich. I've yet to
| encounter that at a restaurant.
| skipants wrote:
| A bit of a tangent, but I just want to say how, as a Canadian,
| I'm getting a lot of joy reading about this restaurant. It's a
| hilarious facsimile of a Canadian restaurant for a couple
| reasons:
|
| - There's nothing Canadian about a pancake house. We love
| pancakes but they aren't really ingrained with our identity.
| Maple syrup on the other hand, is EXTREMELY important to a lot
| of Canadians. Serving table syrup instead of real maple syrup
| is an affront. I found a Reddit thread[1] where a user espouses
| "tons of free syrup" you were given at RCPH. That's NOT a good
| thing if you ask me!
|
| - In Canada (and I assume other British Commonwealth countries)
| you aren't legally allowed to have "Royal" in the name of your
| business without Royal consent from the Governor General of
| Canada[2]
|
| Just a bit of Canadiana sparked by your comment I thought I'd
| share. I always get a kick of the small but conspicuous
| cultural differences between Canada and USA. They give me that
| Ingluorious Basterds "number 3" moment.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/newyorkcity/comments/1ajujhi/who_re...
|
| [2] https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/royal-
| sy...
| criddell wrote:
| If "Royal" is protected, the bar is pretty low:
|
| https://www.canadacompanyregistry.com/catagory/Royal/
| skipants wrote:
| HA! I guess it's not as enforced as I expected.
| fyltr wrote:
| 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.
| 01100011 wrote:
| 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).
| jfengel wrote:
| Congratulations. You've reinvented the souffle.
| muzani wrote:
| 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.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| 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...
| jnaina wrote:
| 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.
| muzani wrote:
| The palm oil makes the difference. Not exactly drenched,
| but just enough for the crispy Mallard reaction.
|
| It's a little simpler than the given recipe too. Just a
| regular paratha, crack an egg directly onto it, then cook
| on a griddle.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| There is prior art in the grilled cheese and eggs area: Denny's
| Moons Over My Hammy.
| psini wrote:
| For a continental vibe see the french "Croque Madame"
| lemonberry wrote:
| Is that different than a "Croque Monsieur"? For whatever
| reason I've been watching Jacques Pepin videos recently.
| The crust on his "Croque Monsieur" is incredible.
|
| https://youtu.be/2ZTOUyUBCz4
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| Or the even more legendary Breakfast Dagwood
| https://violasmithcooking.blogspot.com/2009/08/breakfast-
| dag...
| vasco wrote:
| We can certainly drink eggs, Rocky had a few in the morning
| before he went to punch hanging frozen meat.
| purplezooey wrote:
| No mention of Eggs Florentine?
| medi8r wrote:
| Breakfast is just generally milquetoast then?
| zem wrote:
| french toast was dismissed far too lightly, it's exactly what
| goes into the gap. also savoury bread pudding.
| kasitmp wrote:
| Salzburger Nockerln seems to fit in that area.
| https://www.austria.info/en-gb/recipes/salzburger-nockerl/
| jacknews wrote:
| 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.
| csmantle wrote:
| This reminded me of <https://xkcd.com/2893/>.
| aggakake wrote:
| Aggakake or oeuf au lait.
|
| 3 eggs, 2 cups milk, 1 cup flour. Makes a nice flan/pudding
| consistency. Eggy and delicious.
| moultano wrote:
| Aggakake is on the chart!
| aichen_tools wrote:
| 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.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| What about eggs eggs and milk breakfast? (Omelette with cheese).
| Plenty of protein and little sugar
| bbminner wrote:
| 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.
| tsukikage wrote:
| Quark works better than cottage cheese, if you don't have
| access to tvorog
| pbnjay wrote:
| 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).
| aunty_helen wrote:
| Agreed, he's added criteria for excluding French toast to fit
| his narrative. Gaslighting the world away from us French toast
| lovers.
|
| And don't get me started on breakfast burritos, top 10 food
| that's just ridiculous if you're ordering it after 3pm?
| petesergeant wrote:
| 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
| ccppurcell wrote:
| 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.
| graypegg wrote:
| Chicken maybe? It would represent an egg that did exist, but
| now doesn't.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Also, in the other direction in space time, it's an egg that
| could have been, but now won't.
| nortlov wrote:
| Schrodinger's egg?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| More like Minkowski's egg in this case.
| 1659447091 wrote:
| Now I want some chicken & waffles
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_and_waffles
| ccppurcell wrote:
| In the breakfast space, I'm afraid, chicken is orthogonal to
| eggs.
| porphyra wrote:
| Maybe the axes are actually logarithmic so 0 is 1 egg, 1 is e
| eggs, -1 is 1/e eggs, etc.
| asdff wrote:
| Easy. Start eating two eggs a day. Then one day, eat three eggs
| taking the extra egg from tomorrows two spare eggs left in the
| carton.
| moron4hire wrote:
| What is menstruation but negative egg entering the body?
| anon_cow1111 wrote:
| I think I will attempt to just eat the negative eggs because at
| least I recognize, and can define what both "negative" and
| "eggs" mean. Can't say the same for literally half the words in
| the OP's graph.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| These are a Barycentric Coordinate System, so the weights on
| the targets are normalized, must sum to one, and must be
| positive.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_coordinate_system
|
| Barycentric coordinates are the local coordinate system inside
| a simplex. A simplicial complex is what you get when you glue
| multiple simplices together along shared k-faces for k = 0 ...
| n -- vertices (0-faces), edges (1-faces), triangles (2-faces),
| tetrahedra (3-faces), and higher-dimensional faces -- to form a
| larger state space.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplicial_complex
|
| It's not possible to have negative eggs, but you can apply the
| same machinery to many other things, like facial animation mesh
| blend shapes (Apple ARKit, Blender Blend Shapes and the FaceIt
| plugin, Unity SkinnedMeshRenderer, etc), where weights are
| often allowed to be overdriven >1 or even underdriven <0 for
| exaggerated or monstrous effects.
|
| Nouveau Art Pipeline Demo: Blend Shapes:
|
| https://youtu.be/phM8Wnzs_-g?t=104
|
| (None of Epstein's spiritually close friends and shameless guru
| confidants were harmed or embarrassed in this demo, alas.)
|
| Eric Hedman - "Doppel" Character Modelling with Blendshapes for
| Animation (ARKit):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L7jtgRD5rs
|
| (Eric "Irk" Hedman designed and created the character
| animations and objects in The Sims 1, and as you can see is
| extremely skilled and delightful to work with! Hire him if you
| need professional high quality creative artwork and animation,
| and can pay him in bananas:
| https://erichedman.artstation.com/projects/8wJDgw )
|
| Faceit: Facial Expressions And Performance Capture (Blender):
|
| https://superhivemarket.com/products/faceit
|
| Unity SkinnedMeshRenderer:
|
| https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.3/Documentation/ScriptReferenc...
|
| Apple ARKit Tracking and visualizing faces:
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/ARKit/tracking-and...
|
| ARFaceAnchor.BlendShapeLocation: Identifiers for specific
| facial features, for use with coefficients describing the
| relative movements of those features.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/arfaceanchor...
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > unless you want to explain to me how to eat negative eggs.
|
| I'm sure there's a good joke in there involving trans-
| dimensional vegans, but I'm still on my first cup of coffee.
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| Are you telling me this dimensional vegan is trans.
| tclancy wrote:
| There's a guy in overalls in a Brooklyn bistro who used to
| scramble them but that was very late-summer 2025 and you'll get
| funny looks for asking about them.
| felineflock wrote:
| I think it is all normalized into positive vector space [0, 1]
| using min-max.
| getnormality wrote:
| The vectors containing the weights of each ingredient live in
| the positive orthant (x >= 0).
|
| When you divide by x by sum(x), the resulting vector p has p >=
| 0 and sum(p) = 1. That new sum constraint is how you get the
| simplex.
| d--b wrote:
| maybe Portugal's Pastel de Nata falls in the dark zone?
|
| It's a baked custard (so plenty of eggs) in a pie.
|
| not sure the proportions match.
| theoa wrote:
| Posts like this are why I read Hacker News.
|
| My Egg McMuffin will never look the same!
| xg15 wrote:
| This is amazing - and somehow channels both Douglas Adams and
| Randall Munroe at the same time...
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Frankly I'm surprised Randall Munroe hasn't done this. (I
| assume he hasn't because nobody has linked to it.)
| moultano wrote:
| Thank you! Two of my favorites. I'm honored.
| pxtail wrote:
| 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.
| reedf1 wrote:
| The ones who walk away from omelettes.
| messe wrote:
| That's a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry worthy reference.
| talldan wrote:
| A Japanese Souffle Pancake might be in the Dark Breakfast realm.
| haritha-j wrote:
| 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.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| FYI, You may not have to travel to Sri Lanka to try one.
|
| You can get them e.g. in London UK:
| https://www.hopperslondon.com/
| Quarrel wrote:
| sadly, they don't open for breakfast.
|
| I wonder if this is why I've missed them? I've lived within a
| few hundred metres of their Soho place for the best part of
| the last decade.
| haritha-j wrote:
| I've tried their Kings X restaurant, and while their food is
| delicious, and the decor is also really nice, its not
| particularly authentic, and I felt its a bit overpriced (tbf
| its an extremely central location). I don't live in London so
| can't suggest a better alternative, but I'm sure there are
| much more authentic restaurants.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > the decor is also really nice, its not particularly
| authentic, and I felt its a bit overpriced
|
| That describes all of the restaurants in the Kings Cross
| newly built area. They are all different cuisines, but they
| all fit.
| Quarrel wrote:
| These look great, squarely in my breakfast wheelhouse,
| definitely eggy, but with - well, I guess what I now know as a
| hint of darkness. Thanks for sharing.
|
| I've been meaning to go to Sri Lanka..
| graemep wrote:
| Going to share my advice to people going to Sri Lanka (other
| than what food to try and where) is to not focus on beaches
| (which are mostly pretty average) and go to the mountains and
| ancient cities which are unique and amazing.
|
| Hoppers are not only Sri Lankan - also found in parts of
| South India and I think in some places in SE Asia.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Same. When I was on a bit of black beach I looked on the
| internet and found quite a few boats had shed oil along
| there. Everything else was good though.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| And is a decidedly superior breakfast.
| moultano wrote:
| Wow! Great suggestion. Whether to count coconut milk as milk is
| a decision I had not yet had to make.
|
| My thinking at the moment is that I probably would not. It
| seems like further research would reveal a whole new region in
| the upper left, clustering with Dan Bing, of "asian milkless
| crepes."
| batisteo wrote:
| What dimension would you add to make a tetrahedron?
| fhdkweig wrote:
| I would add sugar.
|
| Egg nog is listed on the triangle as away from flour, but
| it is extremely high in carbs. When I was a kid, I loved
| egg nog and a couple of years ago I decided to purchase
| some. I liked it so much I drank the whole half gallon in a
| day. That night I had horrible painful bloating and looked
| at the ingredients label to find "sugar", "cane sugar".
| "corn syrup", and "high fructose corn syrup".
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's not so much that it's high in carbs, it's
| extraordinarily high in fat. Its main ingredients are egg
| yolks and heavy cream along with the sugar. What you're
| describing is like eating an entire cheesecake or
| drinking a pitcher of melted premium ice cream. The
| bloating is from the enormous amount of fatty calories
| that are slow to digest. Not really about the sugar. (And
| of course it has sugar, it's essentially a dessert
| drink.)
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| My money is on the amount of lactose in all that dairy.
| There's a lot of lactose in a half gallon of nog.
| goodmythical wrote:
| Right? I felt bloated just thinking about drinking a half
| gallon of nog.
| recursive wrote:
| I can barely get through an 8 oz glass of that stuff.
| Wow.
| beAbU wrote:
| Bacon
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Bacon. Or tomatoes.
| hammock wrote:
| Something like a Dutch baby (German pancake) qualifies as
| dark breakfast (4 eggs 1/2c flour 1/2 c milk
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| I bet they would work with milk milk, though.
| s_dev wrote:
| Giant string hoppers are far superior:
| https://www.hungrylankan.com/recipes/sri-lankan-string-hoppe...
|
| They are delicious, similar to noodles but I eat them cold with
| a dry chutney and a great breakfast.
| jeej wrote:
| The Egglish Muffin.
| opan wrote:
| 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.
| hilliardfarmer wrote:
| That is not what we are talking about.
|
| Also, amazing article, haven't laughed that hard all day!
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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.
| have_faith wrote:
| Eating a lot of food is tiring and you have plenty of energy
| stored from the previous day(s) food.
| yen223 wrote:
| It depends on whether you're making the breakfast, or someone
| else is making your breakfast.
|
| Light breakfasts are popular if you have to make it yourself
| bregma wrote:
| Circadian rhythm. In many people their liver releases a bunch
| of glucose right before waking, something diabetics term the
| "dawn effect" and need to control for. This helps get the
| metabolism going first thing in the morning (at least, in
| non-diabetics) and delays the need for caloric intake until
| later in the day. This effect is easily witnessed if you
| check your blood glucose before bed and when you rise in the
| morning: for example earlier in the week mine was around 5.4
| mmol/L (normal) at bed time and 8.6 mmol/L (high for fasting
| blood glucose) before breakfast the next day.
|
| A normal person will need caloric replenishment during the
| day, especially later in the day before (typically) an 8 to
| 10 hour fast during the night.
|
| So, small proteine-heavy breakfast, large balanced dinner in
| the evening with a smaller balanced mid-day meal in the
| middle.
| asdff wrote:
| Egg scramble fluffed with milk plus slice of toast might qualify
| moron4hire wrote:
| 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?
| fedeb95 wrote:
| where's porridge?
|
| Breakfast has way more dimensions.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| I agree, that is an oversight.
|
| Porridge is an extremely common breakfast here in Sweden. There
| is a huge number of different variations of it as well.
|
| And then there is musli, with and without yogurt / sour milk.
| Tepix wrote:
| 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.
| Tade0 wrote:
| That's a hard one.
|
| In terms of beverages alcohol-free beer gained popularity in
| recent years because it's not sweet, has half the calories of
| juice/soda yet actually carries some taste.
|
| If I were to imagine something fitting this description, it
| would have to be something you have to chew for extended
| periods of time.
| miningape wrote:
| South African food actually has this in abundance, biltong is
| like beef jerky but better in almost every conceivable way -
| not to mention all the other variants of it for example dry
| stix, droevors, etc.
|
| Not to say we don't also have other sweet snacks, but compared
| to other places I've been nowhere quite has the same level of
| "savory" snacks
| roryirvine wrote:
| Nuts (in the culinary sense) and cheese are good for that - a
| mini-cheeseboard with a couple of different bits of cheese
| (maybe 20-30g of each), a handful of cashews and walnuts, and
| maybe a dab of fig jam or membrillo on the side.
|
| Tasty, nutrient-dense, surprisingly filling. Great as a mid-
| afternoon snack, or add some fruit and a bit of bread or some
| oatcakes to make it into a decent lunch.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Applying Tom Ngo's Embedded Constraint Graphics to Direct-
| Manipulation Breakfast Selection (Direct manipulation over
| simplicial complexes using barycentric interpolation: they're not
| just for breakfast any more.)
|
| The Breakfast Simplex is a space of recipes parameterized by
| {egg, milk, flour} ratios, normalized onto a simplex. Add butter
| or sugar and the dimension increases. Add prep method and you
| create adjacent regions. A breakfast buffet is a larger, possibly
| disconnected simplicial complex spanning multiple ingredient
| families.
|
| That structure is exactly what Tom Ngo formalized and patented in
| Embedded Constraint Graphics in 1996 at Interval Research
| Corporation. I wrote about it when the patent expired in 2016:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12572696
|
| US Patent #5933150: System for image manipulation and animation
| using embedded constraint graphics
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US5933150
|
| When I asked Tom about applying ECG to other applications after
| the patent expired, he wrote:
|
| >I am, of course, partial to the idea that gluing high-
| dimensional simplices at their edges and faces is an extremely
| general way to represent blending manifolds, in the same way that
| gluing polygons together has done us so much good in the 3D
| modeling space. I also think the >2 decades of progress since ECG
| have put us in a better position to do something really cool
| based on direct manipulation.
|
| Golan Levin, Malcolm Slaney, and Tom Ngo used the ECG graphical
| editor to build the vector face cartoons for Mouther, simply by
| dragging eyes, mouths, and features directly on the drawing:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20180717222910/http://www.flong....
|
| ECG defines example states at vertices. Compatible examples span
| simplices. The full state space is a simplicial complex. Interior
| points are barycentric blends.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplicial_complex
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_coordinate_system
|
| When you drag something in screen space, the system maps that
| motion into the n-dimensional interpolation space and solves for
| blend weights via the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse of the Jacobian
| matrix, the same linear algebra used in inverse kinematics.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%E2%80%93Penrose_inverse
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_matrix_and_determinan...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_kinematics
|
| You don't indirectly adjust abstract sliders. You directly
| manipulate concrete outcomes. The solver recovers coordinates.
|
| The same formulation applies to interpolating vector drawings,
| mesh blending, facial animation, pose spaces, and other example-
| based interfaces where states are meaningful and compatibility
| matters.
|
| The same geometric intuition appears in large language models.
| Tokens and concepts are represented as high-dimensional vectors,
| and model activations are computed through weighted linear
| combinations in embedding space. Interpolating between embeddings
| corresponds to moving through that vector space via weighted
| blends, just in many more dimensions. ECG makes the simplices
| explicit and topologically structured, while LLM representations
| are implicit and learned. In both cases, behavior emerges from
| interpolation in high-dimensional spaces.
|
| Apple's ARKit already exposes facial expression as a set of named
| blend shape coefficients via ARFaceAnchor -- values like
| mouthSmileLeft, jawOpen, and eyeBlinkRight driving a 3D face mesh
| in real time. Bring Mouther into 3D and you can drag the mouth
| corners upward to interpolate toward smiling targets, mapping
| that motion through the same barycentric machinery into blend
| weights instead of hard-coded sliders. This would make a great
| Blender plug-in for directly manipulating facial animation, to
| use with FaceIt!
|
| Faceit : Facial Expressions And Performance Capture
|
| https://superhivemarket.com/products/faceit
|
| Breakfast is a concrete instance. Pancake, crepe, and omelette
| define a simplex over ingredient ratios. Drag toward eggs and the
| egg weight increases. Drag toward milk and you move along that
| axis. Cross the egg-milk edge shared by the crepe simplex {flour,
| egg, milk} and the custard simplex {egg, milk, sugar}, and you
| move from thin batters into sweet custards without leaving the
| manifold. The Dark Breakfast region is simply an unoccupied part
| of a valid simplex -- suggesting adjacent, unexplored Dark
| Custard subspaces rather than forbidden states.
|
| Simplicial complexes are useful UI primitives. They provide local
| linear interpolation inside zones and explicit global topology
| across zones. They scale to higher dimensions, while maintaining
| a user friendly 2D direct manipulation user interface. They
| encode constraints structurally instead of procedurally.
|
| A pie menu can be viewed as a radial parameterization of a
| simplex. A direct-manipulation pie menu over ingredient space
| lets you drag in the direction of the crusts and fillings you
| want, with barycentric weights accumulating as you move.
|
| The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus (Dr. Dobb's Journal,
| Dec. 1991, cover story, user interface issue.)
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-design-and-implementation-...
|
| An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus (Jack Callahan,
| Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser and Ben Shneiderman. Presented at ACM
| CHI'88 Conference, Washington DC, 1988.)
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...
| paganel wrote:
| No jam and butter option when writing that long of a post on what
| to eat for breakfast is criminal.
| pseingatl wrote:
| Colombia's _bandeja paisa_.
| dghf wrote:
| No egg banjo*? That sounds like it would sit close to, if not in,
| the abyss.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_sandwich#Fried_egg_sandwic...
| vanderZwan wrote:
| 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.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Dutch Baby or German Pancake is probably right in that abyss.
|
| Very eggy, with some flour/milk. It's essentially a souffle,
| puffs up to like 6" high in the oven. Tasty with maple syrup,
| powdered sugar/lemon, or just butter.
|
| 6 Eggs, 1 C flour, 1C milk.
|
| https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/36900/german-pancakes-ii/
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| No (1). I believe that it's "Dutch" in the same sense as
| "Pennsylvania Dutch" (2) - i.e. an American version of
| "Deutsch", actually German.
|
| 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_baby_pancake
|
| 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Dutch
| meatmanek wrote:
| obligatory CGP Grey https://youtu.be/eE_IUPInEuc?t=74
|
| > Confusion continues because: People who live in the
| Hollands are called Hollanders, but all citizens of the
| Netherlands are called Dutch as is their language.
|
| > But in Dutch they say: "Nederlands sprekende Nederlanders
| in Nederland" which sounds like they'd rather we call them
| Netherlanders speaking Netherlandish.
|
| > Meanwhile, next door in Germany, they're "Deutsche sprechen
| Deutsch in Deutschland". Which sounds like they'd rather be
| called Dutch.
| madduci wrote:
| It misses a lot of other breakfast options:
|
| - croissants - muesli/porridge/oatmeal - cookies - toasts - bread
| & butter (nutella too)
| bregma wrote:
| Things made of flour? I think they were explicitly covered.
| Perhaps "Flour" should have been more generally "Grain-based"
| to cover oatmeal and rye bread. Maybe add potatoes for a
| "starches" category.
|
| What it's missing is fish, fruit, preserved meats (bacon, ham,
| sausage, black pudding?). It's very culturally biased to
| typical North American breakfast choices.
| flerovium114 wrote:
| pizza
| impure wrote:
| It has been speculated that over half of the breakfast in the
| universe is dark breakfast.
| Oarch wrote:
| By mass, sure - but have you considered delectability?
| mekdoonggi wrote:
| Even though it's not delectable by current methods, we can
| observe dark breakfasts effects on the movement of dietary
| bodies.
| tclancy wrote:
| Can be confirmed by the fact anytime I eat a diner breakfast I
| feel more full than can be justified by the weight of the food
| alone.
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| There's a lot more dark breakfast in the winter time.
| riskable wrote:
| On the darkest day of the year, the dark breakfast can be
| balanced on its edge.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Others say we underestimated the importance of a small quantity
| of eggs and proposed a modified theory that doesn't need dark
| breakfast.
| tbyehl wrote:
| "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.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| 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!
| mynegation wrote:
| So basically omelette with matzo
| igrekel wrote:
| A souffle would fit some of the void. It has some flour in the
| bechamel.. whipped egg whites etc.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _IHOP omelettes include pancake batter._
|
| Wait what? I've never heard of such a thing.
|
| Does that make them better in any way? Or strictly worse, but
| cheaper?
|
| Edit: looked it up and apparently they still use 3 eggs but the
| batter makes it super fluffy (like 2x) so the omelette looks
| enormous.
| PcChip wrote:
| It's a landmine for low carb gluten free people
| Oarch wrote:
| It would be remiss not to also mention The Cube Rule
|
| https://cuberule.com/
| moffers wrote:
| Surprised not to see "breakfast pasta" aka Carbonara. Wheat in
| the noodles, egg and cheese sauce.
| xgkickt wrote:
| Or pasta as a cereal, in a bowl with milk.
| Beestie wrote:
| I am humbled by the genius of this article.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| You can tell a non-US-southerner wrote this because there's not a
| biscuit to be had here.
|
| WHERE ARE THE BISCUITS???
| d-us-vb wrote:
| 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.
| deeg wrote:
| I'm sorry, but I can't take seriously any topic in breakfast that
| leaves out the Taj Mahal of breakfast: stuffed French toast. I
| know there is reasoning for it but its inexcusable. Its like
| leaving Miracle Max out of a discussion of best physicians
| because he's fictional.
|
| There's also no mention of the fourth leg of the breakfast triad:
| maple syrup.
| mekdoonggi wrote:
| Eggs benedict calls from the abyss, humanities' metabolic Voyager
| 1, speeding into the unknown.
| lambda wrote:
| Are we counting butter as milk? Because hollandaise sauce is an
| emulsion of egg yolk, butter, and lemon juice, so no milk
| directly unless we count butter.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| 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.
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| This is the greatest text I have read in the last 10 years, it
| kept getting better as it went along.
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| It's what they ate on the Red October
| anal_reactor wrote:
| 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. "Nalesniki"
| 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".
| fortranfiend wrote:
| Cold pizza dead center.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Cold pizza + eggs, but then we're just in "egg & cheese
| sandwich" territory which is one obvious "dark breakfast".
| dfxm12 wrote:
| 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?
| awesomeusername wrote:
| So that blurry eye vision I get in the morning could be from
| gravitational lensing from dark breakfast?
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