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

Sliced Okralnut 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. A thin slice is more surface: it browns faster and it dries out faster. These are usually eaten cooked: Okra. You said raw, so raw it is — there is nothing unsafe in it.

What it is made of, by weight 385 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. 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.

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
95% The first thing that decides the consistency.
Fat
12% 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

Crushed potatoes with yoghurt

Boil, crush, roast. A rough surface means more crust.

But not today

It needs Potato, 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, 385 g in total

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

  • 200g Yoghurt
  • 16.5pcs Okra ≈ 100 g
  • 10pcs Walnut ≈ 50 g
  • 30g Vinegar
  • 5g Black pepper

Added at the end: Salt, 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.

At the shop
  • 17 pcs Okra

How to make it

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

    • Yoghurt
    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 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. Add the black pepper, vinegar at the moment of serving, not before.

    • Black pepper
    • Vinegar
    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. Prepare the okra 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.

    • Okra
    • 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.
  5. 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 7
  3. Sour 36
  4. Bitter 16
  5. Umami 16
  6. Heat 4
  7. Richness 25
  8. Aroma 43

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.