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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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

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.

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).

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

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

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

The concept of a 'Dark Breakfast Abyss' in the Breakfast Simplex is hilarious, but it got me thinking—maybe the reason we lack foods in that specific ratio of milk, flour, and eggs isn't because they'd destroy the world, but because they simply don't cook well conceptually. Like, an overly-battered omelette just turns into a gummy mess, not a crepe. It's fascinating how our culinary traditions naturally naturally sort themselves into these distinct mathematical vertices over centuries of trial and error.

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

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

"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.

It would be remiss not to also mention The Cube Rule

https://cuberule.com/

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.

Posts like this are why I read Hacker News.

My Egg McMuffin will never look the same!

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

Fancy projection math is only for after coffee!

Eggs benedict calls from the abyss, humanities' metabolic Voyager 1, speeding into the unknown.

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's what they ate on the Red October

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

WHERE ARE THE BISCUITS???

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.

Congratulations. You've reinvented the souffle.

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...

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.

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".

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.

It misses a lot of other breakfast options:

- croissants - muesli/porridge/oatmeal - cookies - toasts - bread & butter (nutella too)

Isn't it something like pancake with more eggs?

Breakfast is just generally milquetoast then?

Aggakake or oeuf au lait.

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

What about eggs eggs and milk breakfast? (Omelette with cheese). Plenty of protein and little sugar

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

A Japanese Souffle Pancake might be in the Dark Breakfast realm.

I am humbled by the genius of this article.

> 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.

Colombia's bandeja paisa.

So basically omelette with matzo

Egg scramble fluffed with milk plus slice of toast might qualify

This is the kind of creative thinking that makes HN great. Using the framework of dark matter detection to explore unobserved breakfast possibilities is both hilarious and oddly rigorous. The breakfast phase space is clearly under-explored.

The ones who walk away from omelettes.

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?

french toast was dismissed far too lightly, it's exactly what goes into the gap. also savoury bread pudding.

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.

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

This reminded me of <https://xkcd.com/2893/>.

No mention of Eggs Florentine?

where's porridge?

Breakfast has way more dimensions.

No jam and butter option when writing that long of a post on what to eat for breakfast is criminal.

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...

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.

What about vegetable-forward breakfasts? Completely not on this chart.

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