Google Engineer Maps Breakfast as a Vector Space, Finds a Forbidden Recipe in the Void
Google Engineer Maps Breakfast as a Vector Space, Finds a Forbidden Recipe in the Voida man stood in his kitchen, had a hypoxia-induced math epiphany, and realized pancakes and scrambled eggs exist on the same geometric plane. then he found the hole.
Every breakfast you’ve ever eaten clusters into 3 regions on a milk-eggs-flour simplex. But there’s a gaping void in the middle that no culture on earth has filled. He found the recipe. Nobody has dared cook it.
Ryan Moulton, Google engineer and apparent breakfast theorist, just published what might be the most unhinged piece of food mathematics the internet has seen since someone calculated the optimal way to eat a Pringle.
🧩 Dumb Mode Dictionary
| Term | Translation |
|---|---|
| Vector Space | a math framework where things can be described by coordinates — like GPS but for pancake ratios |
| Simplex | a triangle where every point represents a different mix of 3 ingredients (milk, eggs, flour) |
| Dark Breakfast | a breakfast that should exist mathematically but nobody has ever made or eaten |
| Manifold | the surface of all possible breakfasts — imagine a map where every recipe has a location |
| Metastable | barely holding together — change one variable and you get a completely different food |
| Barycentric Coordinates | a way to describe where something sits inside a triangle using ratios |
| Accretion Disk | a ring of stuff spiraling around a center point — here it’s egg dishes orbiting pure egg |
🔍 The Actual Premise (It's Not a Shitpost)
so here’s what happened. Ryan Moulton was making breakfast at high altitude. hypoxia hit. and his brain did that thing where it connects two ideas that have no business being connected.
“Breakfast is a vector space.”
pancakes, crepes, and scrambled eggs all use the same three ingredients — milk, eggs, and flour — just in different ratios. which means you can plot them on a triangle (a simplex) where each corner represents 100% of one ingredient.
he wasn’t wrong. he was catastrophically correct. because once you start mapping breakfasts this way, you find that humans have explored most of the triangle… except for one massive region in the middle.
the void. the abyss. the dark breakfast.
📊 The Three Kingdoms of Breakfast
Moulton identified three major clusters where all known breakfasts live:
| Region | What Lives There | Vibe |
|---|---|---|
 The Pancake Local Group |
pancakes, crepes, waffles, swedish pancakes, blinis, dan bing, crumpets | chaotic, fractal — tiny recipe changes = totally different food |
 The Baked Good Quadrant |
muffins, madeleines, clafoutis, scones | “breakfasts” by convention only, could be served at any meal |
 The Egg Singularity & Custard Accretion Disk |
omelettes, over easy, soft boiled, custards | dozens of dishes stacked on the pure-egg point, with a milky tail |
he mapped everything. kaiserschmarrn. nalesniki. parathas. pannu kakku. crumpets from england. dan bing from taiwan. nothing fills the gap.
⚠️ The IHOP Revelation
deep in his research, Moulton found something disturbing. an obscure document on the IHOP website revealed that IHOP puts pancake batter in their omelettes.
this means IHOP omelettes exist somewhere between pancakes and eggs on the simplex. by interpolating between those two points, the line must pass through the Dark Breakfast Abyss.
IHOP has been flirting with the forbidden zone this whole time.
“The International House of Pancakes is playing a dangerous game. If someday a remote IHOP splashes a little too much batter in their omelette, cooks the Forbidden Breakfast, and thereby brings about the end of the world, well, at least we know the Waffle House will be open.”
lowkey the hardest closing line i’ve read in a math paper about eggs.
🗣️ The Internet Reacted Exactly How You'd Expect
Hacker News lost its collective mind. selected reactions:
- “Posts like this are why I read Hacker News” — literally everyone
- someone compared it to Douglas Adams meets Randall Munroe which is… accurate
- a Sri Lankan person immediately said egg hoppers fit “squarely in the dark abyss” — potential dark breakfast candidate found??
- Dutch Baby pancakes and Salzburger Nockerln were also nominated as void-dwellers
- someone called it a “barycentric coordinate system for food” which is the most Hacker News sentence possible
- the IHOP batter revelation was described as “a landmine for low carb gluten free people”
others pointed out the framework excludes bread, fish, fruit, and preserved meats entirely. which is fair but also — stay on topic, this man is doing science.
🧠 Why This Actually Matters (For 2 Paragraphs, i Promise)
this isn’t just breakfast comedy. it’s a clean demonstration of how dimensional reduction and simplex mapping can reveal gaps in explored parameter spaces. the same technique is used in materials science, drug discovery, and flavor chemistry.
food scientists at companies like IFF and Givaudan literally use similar simplices to map flavor compounds and find unexplored combinations. Moulton accidentally did real combinatorial food science with vibes and a blog post. and honestly that hits different when you remember the dude was hypoxic while cooking eggs.
📜 The Forbidden Recipe
he actually published it. the madman.
Dark Breakfast
| Ingredient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Milk | ¼ cup |
| Eggs | 4 |
| Flour | ½ cup |
Instructions: Unknown.
that’s it. that’s the recipe. he found the coordinates of the dark breakfast on the simplex but literally nobody knows how to cook it. bake it? fry it? boil it? the method is part of the mystery.
the article ends with a Lovecraft quote about how “the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” because of course it does.
Cool. A Man Found a Hole in Breakfast. Now What the Hell Do We Do? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
🧪 Hustle 1: Actually Cook the Dark Breakfast
somebody has to do it. grab ¼ cup milk, 4 eggs, ½ cup flour, and start experimenting. the batter will be egg-heavy with moderate flour — think somewhere between a thick crepe and a loose dumpling dough. try pan-frying, baking, and steaming. document everything. post to r/Cooking and TikTok.
Example: a culinary student in São Paulo, Brazil makes 12 variations of the dark breakfast recipe using different cooking methods, posts a TikTok series that hits 2.3M views, gets invited to a food science podcast, and launches a breakfast pop-up.
Timeline: 1 weekend to cook, 1 week for content, ongoing for clout
📐 Hustle 2: Build an Interactive Breakfast Simplex
Moulton’s maps are static images. build a proper interactive web tool where users can plot breakfasts on the simplex, click to see recipes, and submit their own. use D3.js or Three.js. host on Vercel. this is literally a weekend project that could become the definitive breakfast visualization.
Example: a frontend dev in Kraków, Poland builds breakfastsimplex.com in 3 days, posts to Hacker News (guaranteed front page given the source material), gets 48K unique visitors in week one, monetizes with a recipe API for food apps.
🍳 Hustle 3: Launch a Dark Breakfast Challenge on Social Media
create a cooking challenge: #DarkBreakfastChallenge. the rules — ¼ cup milk, 4 eggs, ½ cup flour, any cooking method. people post their attempts. the internet loves a constrained cooking challenge (remember the Dalgona coffee era?). first person to make something edible wins eternal breakfast glory.
Example: a food blogger in Melbourne, Australia starts the challenge on Instagram Reels, tags 10 food creators, it spreads to 150+ entries in 2 weeks, gets picked up by Bon Appétit’s social team, and she lands a brand deal with an egg company worth $4,200.
📖 Hustle 4: Expand the Model to 4+ Dimensions
the current simplex only covers milk, eggs, and flour. add butter as a 4th dimension (tetrahedron). add sugar for a 5th (now you need dimensionality reduction to visualize it). suddenly you’ve got croissants, brioche, and donuts on the map. every new ingredient axis reveals new dark zones.
Example: a data science grad student in Bangalore, India extends the model to 5 ingredients for her portfolio project, publishes it as an interactive Observable notebook, gets 3,400 GitHub stars, and lists it on her resume. lands a data viz role at a food-tech startup paying ₹28L/year.
🛠️ Follow-Up Actions
| Step | Action | Tool/Resource |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Read the original article + download his data/code | moultano’s blog |
| 2 | Actually attempt the Dark Breakfast recipe | your kitchen, a pan, courage |
| 3 | Build an interactive simplex visualizer | D3.js, Observable, or Plotly |
| 4 | Post results to r/Cooking, r/DataIsBeautiful, and HN | Reddit + Hacker News |
| 5 | Research dimensional extensions (add butter, sugar, salt) | any linear algebra textbook or 3Blue1Brown |
Quick Hits
| Want to… | Do this |
|---|---|
| Understand the math |
look up “barycentric coordinates” and “ternary plots” — it’s the same framework used in geology and chemistry |
| Cook the void |
¼ cup milk + 4 eggs + ½ cup flour. method unknown. you’re on your own |
 Visualize your own data |
ternary plot libraries exist for Python (python-ternary), R (ggtern), and JS (Plotly) |
 Find more dark breakfasts |
ask people from cultures with egg-heavy batters — Sri Lankan hoppers, Japanese okonomiyaki variants |
 Go viral |
#DarkBreakfastChallenge — first person to make it taste good wins the internet |
the man looked into the breakfast abyss, and the breakfast abyss looked back. it was hungry.
!