Welcome back to another addition to Video Game Cooking! Today, we’re taking a look at Fallout 4′s ‘Deathclaw Egg Omelette’, a recipe described as ‘A tasty wasteland omelette.’ Going by the in-game model for Deathclaw Omelette, one can actually believe it could taste good.

Until you take a closer look at the recipe, and see that it calls for one Deathclaw egg, as expected, and. A blood pack. A blood pack. A blood pack?? As in, the health regen item you find throughout the Wasteland that contain extracted human blood? 

(Todd Howard, you’ve done it again.)

Omelettes don’t require a binding agent that would need to replace something like milk, or cheese. You don’t need to add anything to eggs to make an omelette. Some egg material, lightly stirred (or beaten), and then panfried into a foldable flap is your bog standard (plain) omelette.

I’ve absolutely no idea why anyone would eat an omelette, and think, ‘hmm, you know what this recipe needs? Human blood.’ This is how you know you’re living in the post-apocalyptic world; when blood packs are added to your breakfast.

I honest to god spent several minutes brainstorming any and all possibilities why blood would be any necessary addition to an omelette recipe. Cooking-wise, it’s not needed, and eggs with blood have no precedent in food culture. Gameplay-wise, it also doesn’t make sense; only a high-level player would have the skills required to encounter a Deathclaw to nab an egg from their nest, and you’d think surviving a Deathclaw is challenge enough to justify this craftable healing item. You shouldn’t need to sacrifice another resource to make this.

The only justification I could find was their health regen hitcounts; a raw Deathclaw egg will provide the player with +45 hitpoints, while a blood pack will give +50 hitpoints over a period of 10 seconds. A cooked Deathclaw Egg Omelette will give the player 115 hitpoints and health regen for several in-game minutes. 

I assume that the developers wanted to encourage the player to cook the eggs that they find, rather than eat them raw like the good old fashioned games where you find entire meals in dungeon pots. However, they needed a justification why a cooked egg yields twice the hitpoints of the raw counterpart alongside its regen abilities, so they required the player throw in a healing item into the recipe too, to compound it all.

Doesn’t explain why we need to use human blood and not, say, any of the in-game vegetables you can also use to heal yourself with, but at least we have more credibility to suspend our disbelief with.

So. Yes, this recipe will be using blood. My lore explanation? This recipe is a traditional, rural Wastelander dish that subscribes to the belief that consuming blood can heal you, or make your stronger. So you celebrate the defeat of a powerful monster like a Deathclaw by consuming human blood, like a warrior’s ritual. 

This theory is based off of the hitpoint recovery difference of blood packs throughout the franchise. Before Fallout 4, using blood packs as healing items didn’t do a whole lot, only giving you a handful of hitpoints. This time, the Sole Survivor heals an impressive amount from a single blood pack. Therefore, fans believe that beforehand, the player would drink these blood packs because they didn’t know any better, while the pre-war Sole Survivor actually knew how to perform a blood transfusion.

So people who knew better wouldn’t fall into this ‘consuming blood’ idea, and either omit the blood from the recipe or disregard this recipe altogether. We’ll assume that we’re your run-of-the-mill citizens from Freeside, and we’re totally on board with adding blood into our egg dish.

So the recipe is simple enough, but again we’re replacing our typical omelette ingredients with other substitutes that emulate how every ingredient in the Wasteland would be irradiated and mutated. Like the Baked Bloatfly recipe, our salt will be replaced with the bolder celery salt, and our pepper with white pepper powder. This will already give our dish a noticeable twang. Unexpectedly (or not, depending on how well you know your eggs), we’re not replacing the egg of the dish with something else. Any bird egg you could find in a grocery taste pretty similar, whether its chicken, quail, or duck. The difference between a duck egg and chicken egg is minuscule compared to duck meat versus chicken meat.

Thing is, a Deathclaw isn’t avian, but reptile. And I’ve never eaten a reptile egg nor seen any in stores near me, but it’s definitely not without precedent. So to get a better idea of what kind of egg we’re expected to work with, I focused on alligator and crocodile eggs; the largest reptile egg I could find detailing both its anatomy and taste. 

I’ve never eaten a reptile egg, but I’ve seen those videos of snakes hatching and so on. Reptile eggs are different. They’re leathery and soft, and the shell looks like malleable leather. Not all of them do, but for the sake of excitement we’ll assume that a Deathclaw egg follows that rule and feels like a warm leather couch to the touch.

Tastewise, they’re apparently pretty mild in flavor. An alligator egg is mostly yolk with only a bit of embryonic fluid, so we can imagine our Deathclaw egg to be protein-heavy in taste and nutrition. To emulate this, we will take four eggs, and separate the yolks for three of them. You’ll end up with four yolks, and one egg white.

Now, blood and eggs do have some precedent; some quick googling resulted in dishes like tortilla española having variations with goat blood, and other dishes that proudly showed a mix of blood sausage folded within the omelette itself. However, I was never able to find a recipe that actually called for blood to be included within the egg mixture.

So our recipe is gonna take some artistic liberties in order to become an actual dish that someone would want to eat. Rather than mixing liquid blood (or blood flakes, depending on how your grocery stocks them), we’re getting black pudding, and folding it within our omelette.  

(Black pudding is a sausage that’s high in blood content. It’s called a ‘pudding’ because those strange people over in the UK call anything that’s boiled a ‘pudding’. Hence, spotted dick being a ‘pudding’ even though its more like a cake with raisins.)

So the recipe itself is simple; mix your four yolks and one white until they’re homogenous. Add your celery salt and white pepper powder to taste. For my portion, I added perhaps half a teaspoon of each, but it was actually a little too much even for my smoker-tainted tongue. Perhaps just a pinch will do fine.

With your greased pan on medium heat, pour the egg mixture upon the surface so it makes a circle. As the underside cooks, you’ll add slices of black pudding on one half of the circle’s hemisphere. Keep in mind – I got black pudding that was ready to serve. You want to make sure your blood sausage needs no further cooking to be palatable.

After a minute, your omelette should be solid enough to be flipped; fold one side of the circle over the black sausage slices so that it makes an envelope, with fully-cooked egg on the outside and runny egg on the inside.

For the next few minutes, continue flipping the omelette back and forth, so that the inside becomes decently firm without burning the outside. Serve with a few sprigs of mutated cilantro, and a bottle of Nuka-Cola Cherry.

Delicious, post-apocalyptic fare.