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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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...
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
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...
Yes, Earth could be in a Dark Breakfast Local Minimum. Potentially there are worlds out there where all breakfasts are Dark and their scientists cannot even comprehend the idea of an Egg Singularity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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):
ARFaceAnchor.BlendShapeLocation:
Identifiers for specific facial features, for use with coefficients describing the relative movements of those features.
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.
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).
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.
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 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".
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
ECG defines example states at vertices. Compatible examples span simplices. The full state space is a simplicial complex. Interior points are barycentric blends.
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.
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
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.)
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.)
haritha-j|2 days ago
moultano|2 days ago
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."
SideburnsOfDoom|2 days ago
You can get them e.g. in London UK: https://www.hopperslondon.com/
s_dev|2 days ago
They are delicious, similar to noodles but I eat them cold with a dry chutney and a great breakfast.
Quarrel|2 days ago
I've been meaning to go to Sri Lanka..
jeej|2 days ago
hardlianotion|2 days ago
JackFr|3 days ago
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.
skipants|2 days ago
- 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...
mikestorrent|2 days ago
khafra|2 days ago
randallsquared|2 days ago
[*] of course, here I mean proper omelettes, which are an egg shell around ingredients, not scrambled eggs with ingredients mixed in.
noduerme|3 days ago
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.
ekidd|2 days ago
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!
kfarr|3 days ago
mylifeandtimes|2 days ago
yes, a much better vector space. Thank you, Noduerme, you are one of the faithful.
dnpls|2 days ago
heeen2|2 days ago
https://www.okonomikitchen.com/daigaku-imo-japanese-candied-...
tenthirtyam|2 days ago
muzani|3 days ago
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|3 days ago
https://www.thedeliciouscrescent.com/omelette-stuffed-parath...
bathtub365|2 days ago
vasco|2 days ago
unknown|2 days ago
[deleted]
abakker|3 days ago
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
Nursie|2 days ago
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...
josephjeon|3 days ago
unknown|2 days ago
[deleted]
impure|2 days ago
GuB-42|2 days ago
tclancy|2 days ago
qingcharles|2 days ago
Oarch|2 days ago
riskable|2 days ago
BigTTYGothGF|2 days ago
ccppurcell|2 days ago
graypegg|2 days ago
CoastalCoder|2 days ago
I'm sure there's a good joke in there involving trans-dimensional vegans, but I'm still on my first cup of coffee.
asdff|2 days ago
porphyra|2 days ago
moron4hire|2 days ago
getnormality|2 days ago
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.
anon_cow1111|2 days ago
tclancy|2 days ago
felineflock|2 days ago
DonHopkins|2 days ago
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...
opan|2 days ago
Cthulhu_|2 days ago
hilliardfarmer|2 days ago
Also, amazing article, haven't laughed that hard all day!
01100011|3 days ago
d-us-vb|2 days ago
- 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.
kasitmp|3 days ago
unknown|2 days ago
[deleted]
kazinator|3 days ago
scythe|2 days ago
pbnjay|2 days ago
Breakfast burritos are also at least as important as quiche (as in, neither are as tasty without addins - just like omelettes).
aunty_helen|2 days ago
And don’t get me started on breakfast burritos, top 10 food that’s just ridiculous if you’re ordering it after 3pm?
bbminner|2 days ago
tsukikage|2 days ago
anal_reactor|2 days ago
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".
kibwen|3 days ago
kazinator|3 days ago
Bjartr|3 days ago
béchamel (roux + milk) + egg yolks + cheese
lambda|2 days ago
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.
koolba|3 days ago
3RTB297|2 days ago
noduerme|3 days ago
igrekel|2 days ago
DoneWithAllThat|2 days ago
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!
xg15|2 days ago
moultano|2 days ago
madcaptenor|2 days ago
moron4hire|2 days ago
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?
cadamsdotcom|3 days ago
Fancy projection math is only for after coffee!
jonahx|3 days ago
Common for visualizing mixtures of three things!
moultano|3 days ago
theoa|2 days ago
My Egg McMuffin will never look the same!
pxtail|2 days ago
HoldOnAMinute|2 days ago
moffers|2 days ago
xgkickt|2 days ago
aggakake|2 days ago
3 eggs, 2 cups milk, 1 cup flour. Makes a nice flan/pudding consistency. Eggy and delicious.
moultano|2 days ago
vanderZwan|2 days ago
SideburnsOfDoom|2 days ago
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_baby_pancake
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Dutch
wiredfool|2 days ago
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/
jfengel|3 days ago
tbyehl|2 days ago
Tepix|2 days ago
roryirvine|2 days ago
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.
miningape|2 days ago
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
Tade0|2 days ago
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.
dfxm12|2 days ago
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?
Oarch|2 days ago
https://cuberule.com/
SAI_Peregrinus|2 days ago
fyltr|3 days ago
petesergeant|2 days ago
josephjeon|3 days ago
muzani|3 days ago
efreak|2 days ago
brodouevencode|2 days ago
WHERE ARE THE BISCUITS???
medi8r|3 days ago
paganel|2 days ago
hspeiser|3 days ago
moultano|3 days ago
d--b|2 days ago
It’s a baked custard (so plenty of eggs) in a pie.
not sure the proportions match.
dghf|2 days ago
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_sandwich#Fried_egg_sandwic...
p0w3n3d|2 days ago
aichen_tools|2 days ago
fortranfiend|2 days ago
dfxm12|2 days ago
dheera|3 days ago
bigstrat2003|3 days ago
kenty|2 days ago
talldan|2 days ago
madduci|2 days ago
- croissants - muesli/porridge/oatmeal - cookies - toasts - bread & butter (nutella too)
bregma|2 days ago
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|2 days ago
awesomeusername|2 days ago
jacknews|3 days ago
I also get up early and it is often actually dark.
crazygringo|2 days ago
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|2 days ago
mekdoonggi|2 days ago
lambda|2 days ago
pseingatl|2 days ago
deeg|2 days ago
There's also no mention of the fourth leg of the breakfast triad: maple syrup.
asdff|2 days ago
mrbluecoat|2 days ago
Beestie|2 days ago
zem|3 days ago
reedf1|2 days ago
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mynegation|2 days ago
unknown|2 days ago
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csmantle|3 days ago
purplezooey|3 days ago
DonHopkins|2 days ago
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...
fedeb95|2 days ago
Breakfast has way more dimensions.
VorpalWay|2 days ago
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 müsli, with and without yogurt / sour milk.
Humico|1 day ago
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unit149|2 days ago
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ai-christianson|3 days ago
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