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

Cubed Potace boiled

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 pilaf: the grain takes a measured amount of liquid and stays separate.

What are you making
Main dish Soup Salad Hot starter Cold mezze Something sweet Something with dough Börek Cake Pilaf Pasta For breakfast A drink
How to cook it
Raw Sauté Frying Oven Grill Boiling Steamed Pressure
How to cut it
Roughly chopped Cubed Sliced Whole Grated Juice only

Do not pour the water away: everything that dissolved is in it, and it is the base of the next dish. 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 480 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

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

In a bowl, separate grains that hold and the colour of what went in, unbrowned.
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What it should look like

In a bowl, separate grains that hold and the colour of what went in, unbrowned.

Water
66% The first thing that decides the consistency.
Fat
2% Gives the shine and the coating it leaves.
Browning
0% As Maillard runs the colour moves to a warm brown.

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.
Worked out for: Boiling, 100 °C, 25 minutes.

Amounts

For 2, 480 g in total

  • 180g Rice
  • 1pcs Potato ≈ 150 g
  • 1pcs Tomato ≈ 120 g
  • 30g Tomato paste

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. Warm the olive oil in the pan, add the tomato paste and stir for a minute over a low flame. We are not after colour here, only for it to open up.

    • Olive oil
    • Tomato paste
    Why The raw taste of tomato paste only leaves in hot fat, and that is where its colour opens. Spice aroma compounds dissolve in fat, not water.

  2. Add the tomato and turn for another 3–4 minutes. Do not crowd the pan: crowded vegetables steam instead of browning.

    • Tomato
    Why Vegetables are 90% water. In a crowded pan the steam cannot escape, the temperature locks at 100 °C and Maillard never begins.

  3. Add the rice, pour in one and a half times its volume of liquid, cover and drop the heat. Do not lift the lid or stir while it steams.

    • Rice
    Why Stirring pulls starch out of the grain and the pilaf turns to mush. The steam under the lid cooks the grains evenly, and every peek costs you some of it.

  4. Season at the end and by weight: roughly 1% of the total. If it tastes flat, try a squeeze of acid before you reach for more salt.

    • Salt
    Why The 0.8–1.5% band is where flavours sharpen and bitterness is suppressed. Above it, osmosis pulls water out, the texture tightens and the flavour closes down — with no way back.

  5. The potato goes in too: the firm things first, the soft ones after, and close the gap between them with time so everything is done at once.

    • Potato
    Why Everything gives up its water at a different rate. Putting it all in at once is the shortest way to leave one thing raw and collapse another.
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 19
  4. Bitter 10
  5. Umami 32
  6. Heat 1
  7. Richness 7
  8. Aroma 31

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.