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Home · What to cook · We made this up
From what you have

Cubed Almomin mezze

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 cold mezze: no heat at all, and it finishes by sitting in the fridge.

Not cooked at all. The work is in the cutting and in keeping it cold. Even cubes cook evenly. One piece twice the size of the rest is either raw or the reason the others fell apart.

What it is made of, by weight 333 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 fat. In a raw plate the oil is the carrier as much as the flavour: most aroma dissolves in fat, and without it you never taste half of it.

    Olive oil Tahini 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.

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, a smooth mush and the colour of what went in, unbrowned.

Water
94% 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.

What you would really have made

Crêpes

Flour, egg, milk. The one condition for crêpes that do not tear is half an hour of rest.

But not today

It needs Flour, Egg, 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, 333 g in total

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

  • 250g Milk
  • 50g Almond
  • 30g Vinegar
  • 3g Cumin

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. Spread the milk across a wide plate with the back of a spoon, leaving a hollow in the middle.

    • Milk
    Why The eye goes to the hollow first, so putting the oil and the spice there gives the plate a single focus.
  2. Break the almond coarsely and keep it until last. Stirred in early it draws moisture and stops being crisp.

    • Almond
    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. Add the vinegar, cumin at the moment of serving, not before.

    • Vinegar
    • Cumin
    Why Salt pulls water out by osmosis: a salad salted early is sitting in its own liquid within ten minutes and has lost its texture. Acid does the same to a leaf, faster.
  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 13
  2. Salty 2
  3. Sour 33
  4. Bitter 12
  5. Umami 13
  6. Heat 2
  7. Richness 30
  8. Aroma 48

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.