What to cook

What to cook today In the mood for Who I am cooking for Scenarios

Recipes

All recipes Dishes Actually easy Diets

How it works

Ingredients Techniques Workshop Sources and method Diets Recipes
Home · What to cook · We made this up
From what you have

Redion salad

Yes, we just made that name up 😄 There is no such dish — but with what you have, this is exactly what there will be.

This wants to be a salad: raw, cold and tossed at the last moment. Salt it early and it weeps.

How to cook it
Raw

Because you are making salad, only the cooking and cutting that suit it are offered.

Not cooked at all. The work is in the cutting and in keeping it cold. Every extra cut is another cut surface, and every cut surface leaks its juice onto the plate.

What it is made of, by weight 500 g

This is weight, not nutrition. Olive oil can be a tenth of the weight and most of the calories.
You gave no amounts; these are a sensible household measure for each. Change the ratio and you change the dish.

Balance check

Try adding this

  • No acid. A slice of lemon or a teaspoon of vinegar lifts it; without acid the plate reads heavy and flat.

    Lemon Vinegar Sumac
  • No fat. Most aroma compounds dissolve in fat; cook without it and you never taste half the spice.

    Olive oil Butter

Salt, pepper, water and oil are assumed to be in every kitchen; we never count them as missing.

An empty plate
The plate is empty: no photograph of this has been made yet.

You chose raw, but these cannot reach a table uncooked: Red meat — raw meat, poultry and offal are not safe below a core temperature of 70 °C, where Salmonella and E. coli die within minutes. The cooking method was put back — that is a safety limit, not a preference.

Generated once and kept against this exact combination of ingredients, cooking and cut, so everybody who picks the same things sees the same one. It is not a photograph of this dish: nobody has cooked it.

What it should look like

On a plate, in visible pieces and the colour of what went in, unbrowned.

Water
86% The first thing that decides the consistency.
Fat
11% Gives the shine and the coating it leaves.
Heat
none Nothing is cooked: both the colour and the texture come straight from the ingredients.

The figures above are the engine’s reading: the colour comes from the measured colour of what went in and how far browning ran, the consistency from the water fraction, the shine from the fat. The image is generated from those same numbers.
There is no heat in this one: the colour and the texture come straight from the ingredients.

The internal temperature treated as safe for a whole cut is 63 °C with a three-minute rest. Less than that can be a deliberate choice — fine if it is one, not fine if it is an accident.

Amounts

For 2, 500 g in total

The amounts, the steps and the engine’s readings are blurred: making the photograph opens them.

  • 300g Red meat
  • 1pcs Bulb onion ≈ 150 g
  • 10pcs Walnut ≈ 50 g

Added at the end: Salt, Black pepper, Water, Olive oil. No weight is given for these: the amount is a matter of taste, and the engine’s prediction carries none for them either.

How to make it

  1. Slice the bulb onion thinly, leave it in salted water for five minutes and rinse. Most of the raw bite stays in that water.

    • Bulb onion
    • Salt
    • Water
    Why The sulphur compounds behind the bite dissolve in water. Soaking pulls them out and leaves the aroma behind.
  2. Break the walnut coarsely and keep it until last. Stirred in early it draws moisture and stops being crisp.

    • Walnut
    Why Crispness is the sound a dry structure makes when it breaks. The moment moisture gets in, the structure flexes and the sound goes.
  3. Prepare the red meat and put it in the bowl. Do not let it sit after cutting: a cut surface starts losing water and aroma the moment it meets the air.

    • Red meat
    • Water
    Why A cut surface is an open cell wall. Chopped things left to stand give their water and their smell to the air rather than to the plate.
  4. Serve it ten minutes out of the fridge. At 4 °C most of the aroma never reaches the air, so it does not taste cold, it tastes of nothing.

    Why Volatile aroma reaches the nose by evaporating, and evaporation depends on temperature. The same dish smells less when it is cold, and what smells less tastes less.
Taste profile

What it is like

Nobody has eaten this and there is no photograph of it. All we have is the taste vectors of what went in, through the same model every written recipe uses.

  1. Sweet 21
  2. Salty 4
  3. Sour 10
  4. Bitter 19
  5. Umami 34
  6. Heat 2
  7. Richness 37
  8. Aroma 45

This profile is computed rather than measured: the role-weighted average of its ingredients’ taste vectors, shifted by what the cooking does. The thin line is the database average on that axis.