The dish known as Engine Roasted Tip-Yip involved utilizing a starship's engine to roast the remains of a tip-yip, which is a type of bird. Strono Tuggs, an Artiodac chef, incorporated a recipe for this particular dish within the main course section of his second cookbook, titled The Life Day Cookbook. He suggested it as an ideal meal for individuals celebrating the Life Day holiday while being away from their residences.
Engine Roasted Tip-Yip was a type of dish created by thoroughly roasting a complete tip-yip carcass. This fowl, which is indigenous to the moon Endor yet widely accessible across numerous planets, was roasted to a brown hue using the flames originating from a starship engine. Prior to the roasting process, the bird underwent de-feathered and had its legs bound together.
Strono Tuggs, the Artiodac chef, featured a recipe for this dish among the main courses in his second cookbook, The Life Day Cookbook. This cookbook was published sometime after his initial cookbook came out in 34 ABY.
Tuggs promoted the dish as a simple option for celebrating the mid-winter Life Day festival, especially for those who couldn't return home for the occasion. He assured that anyone preparing the dish would receive high praise from their crew. He asserted that tip-yip tasted superior when roasted at intense temperatures, such as those produced by ship thrusters, as this would result in crispy skin and succulent meat. Tuggs also acknowledged that the dish could be prepared in a conventional oven, but he felt that it would lack the same level of enjoyment.
The initial appearance of Engine Roasted Tip-Yip occurred in The LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special, a non-canon short film released in 2020. Within the film, Poe Dameron, a General from the Resistance and a novice at cooking tip-yip, employed the engines of the Millennium Falcon starship to quickly roast a tip-yip on a spit. This was done as part of the preparations for a Life Day celebration on the planet Kashyyyk.
Following the activation of the thrusters by the protocol droid C-3PO, Dameron's comrades Rose Tico and Finn questioned his actions just as the tip-yip carcass charred and ignited. Subsequently, the astromech droid D-O extinguished the flaming bird before a falling tree dislodged it from the spit. After Zorii Bliss, a guest at the party, provided replacement tip-yips, Dameron served a less burnt roast tip-yip during the celebration.
Subsequently, Engine Roasted Tip-Yip received its name and canonical status through its inclusion as a recipe in Star Wars: The Life Day Cookbook, a canon recipe book from 2021 authored by Jenn Fujikawa and Marc Sumerak. The out-of-universe recipe calls for a whole chicken, softened and unsalted butter, minced garlic cloves, dried rosemary, extra virgin olive oil, salt, black pepper, half a medium lemon, and a medium sweet onion.