From what you have

Mintgar soup

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 soup: the pulses drink the liquid and collapse, and the body comes from their own starch.

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

Boiling Pressure

How to cut it

Roughly chopped Cubed Juice only

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

Do not pour the water away: everything that dissolved is in it, and it is the base of the next dish. Every extra cut is another cut surface, and every cut surface leaks its juice onto the plate.

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

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

Water: 6% The first thing that decides the consistency.
Fat: 5% 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, 31 minutes.

What you would really have made

Baked rice pudding

That mottled skin is Maillard, and it forms in the last ten minutes under the grill.

But not today

It needs Milk, Rice, 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, 85 g in total

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

80g Sugar
5g Mint

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

Warm the olive oil in the pan, add the mint and stir for a minute over a low flame. We are not after colour here, only for it to open up.
- Olive oil
- Mint
Why Spice aroma dissolves in fat. Thrown in dry it tastes of powder; bloomed in fat it spreads through the dish.
Add the mint last of all, and keep it away from the flame.
- Mint
Why The aroma compounds in acid and fresh herbs are volatile: in a boiling pot they are the first to go, leaving only sharpness. Squeeze the lemon at the table, not into the pan.
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.

Plating

How it goes on the plate

Use a deep, narrow bowl. Open a small well in the middle with a spoon and pour the sizzled fat in so it spreads in rings. A wedge of lemon on the rim, a pinch of dried herb on top. If the soup reads flat in colour, it needs a contrast — red oil or green herb.

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
Nothing crunchy. Scatter walnuts, almonds or fried breadcrumbs over it: a single-texture dish tires by the third spoonful.
Walnut Almond Pistachio kernels (raw)

Spices

Spices are always open season — unless it is something exotic, every kitchen has them. Cumin, chilli, oregano, pepper: whichever you reach for moves the dish into that cuisine. Bloom dried spice in fat, add fresh herbs off the heat.

Try other ingredients

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.

Sweet 73
Salty 0
Sour 5
Bitter 8
Umami 7
Heat 2
Richness 3
Aroma 29

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.