Why it works: Egg and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 33% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,580 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Poached Eggs
Ingredients
Directions
Poach the eggs
Break the eggs one at a time into a saucer.
Slip the eggs into a pan of boiling salted water.
Move the pan to a cooler part of the stove where the water cannot boil.
Serve
Once the eggs are set, serve with buttered toast.
Sprinkle with pepper and salt.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.
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Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together50,580 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Eggs
- Set proteins form the soft, tender body of the poached egg.
- Buttered toast
- Its fat and crisp texture contrast with the soft, runny egg yolk.
The step that matters
Keep the water below a boil once the eggs are in. Boiling water churns the whites and breaks the eggs apart, while gentle heat lets the whites set around the yolk into a neat shape.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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