Solution to Torus

OPEN SESAME

This pop-up was inspired by the concept of food that looks like one thing but is made of something else.

The first step is to notice that each of the torus names, listed on the Menu image, rhymes with an astrology sign. This is hinted at in a few places:

• Torus is a homophone of Taurus (which also happened to be the current astrological sign when the puzzle was launched.)

• The O in TORUS on the box cover closely resembles a radial astrology chart.

• The flavor text accompanying the puzzle mentions that when you “look up, you'll see a sign”, cluing constellations up in the sky, and later that “We hope you like the sound of that!”, hinting at homophones/rhyming.

Next, note the food each torus is made of. The “Filling & Flavor” lengths confirm the correct words and clarify a few ambiguities (like MAYO instead of MAYONNAISE and COFFEE BEANS instead of just COFFEE.) Each of these food words contains a single letter O, as emphasized on the box cover and by the puzzle’s theme. But what do we do with these O’s?

“Filling & Flavor” refers to two things: the lengths both of the food names and of the English names of the astrology signs (using these lengths to clarify which version to use when there are multiple common translations.) Taking the letter from the English names in the same position as the O in the corresponding food, in numbered order, gives the phrase ALI BABA’S LINE, which clues the final answer: OPEN SESAME.

Notes

• This puzzle got 5,881 submission emails in the 48 hours the solve window was open.

• We came up with OPEN SESAME as a lovely passphrase and then worked backwards. SESAME made us think of bagels, which led to donut shapes. We avoided explicitly mentioning bagels, to avoid solvers making the connections themselves, though some still did.

• This puzzle ended up being very tightly constrained. We numbered the donuts to reaffirm that they stay in the indicated order, rather than being resorted into zodiac order. Each of the foods needed to both have a single O in the correct position and also be visually recognizable.

• We could not have built this puzzle without the help of this dataset from data.world of 7,000 food-related words.

• Virgo is known as both the Maiden and the Virgin, both 6 letters. Ideally we would have had Virgo lead to N, so we could indicate the sixth spot in either word. But this made the other ingredients worse, so we just went with Virgin, and hoped that people would realize the ambiguity and try both options.

• This is the only puzzle in the set to visually portray all the ridiculous food combinations we devised. We loved how these ridiculous CGI images turned out, including two particularly disturbing ones which ended up going unused — bacon and a truly bizarre toric hot dog.

Notes from solvers

• Got lots of messages from folks who found their own extraction and then anagrammed to get something that seemed right. Several used the O’s to pull out a letter from the names of the signs and then anagrammed the result to CALORIC RINGS.

• Tyler wrote us with his own list of possible donut names/rhymes:

  • Were-peas

  • Zebra

  • Myrrh dough

  • Boar musk

  • Achatz scariness

  • Pan stir

  • Some dairy dust

  • Fry grease

  • Cheeto

  • Porgy O's

  • Lemming thigh

  • Acid thorn