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

Grated Eggion drink

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 bowl: fruit over something cold and dairy. No heat, only order and temperature.

How to cook it
How to cut it

Because you are making a drink, 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. Grating multiplies the surface many times over: it cooks far faster and gives up its water at once.

What it is made of, by weight 310 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: Egg — raw egg can carry Salmonella: the white is safe at 63 °C and the yolk at 70 °C. 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

In a bowl, thin enough to pour off a spoon and the colour of what went in, unbrowned.

Water
88% The first thing that decides the consistency.
Fat
14% 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.

Raw or lightly cooked egg carries a salmonella risk. Use pasteurised egg for mayonnaise, tiramisu and the like, and do not serve raw egg to anyone pregnant, to infants, to the elderly or to anyone immunosuppressed.

What you would really have made

White bean patties

There is no protein network here to bind the patty. What takes its place is gelatinised starch, which firms as it cools: the fridge is what holds these together.

But not today

It needs White beans (dry), breadcrumb, and you do not have that. Forcing a substitute is pointless: it stops being that dish anyway and becomes something else. So let us make that something else properly.

Amounts

For 1, 310 g in total

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

  • 1pcs Bulb onion ≈ 150 g
  • 2pcs Egg ≈ 110 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 egg 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.

    • Egg
    • 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 19
  2. Salty 4
  3. Sour 10
  4. Bitter 19
  5. Umami 26
  6. Heat 2
  7. Richness 37
  8. Aroma 40

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.