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Bread Steaks

Bread steaks are bread slices dipped in egg and fried, served with tomato sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Bread Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the egg with milk, pepper, salt, and spice.

  2. Cut slices of bread to the same size and shape.

  3. Alternatively, dip the bread in milk.

  4. Dip the bread slices in the egg mixture.

  5. Cover the bread with egg and a mixture of bread crumbs, lemon peel, sweet herbs, and parsley before frying.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the dipped bread in butter or oil until light brown.

  2. Drain on paper and serve high on a dish with tomato sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

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.

  1. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Bread + tomatotop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,013 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the coating and help it set and brown in the hot fat.
Bread crumbs
Add a crisp, browned crust that contrasts with the soft bread inside.
Milk
Moistens the bread and the egg mixture so the coating stays tender.
Butter or oil
Conducts heat for frying and encourages browning of the crust.

The step that matters

Fry until light brown. Frying over moderate heat browns the coating through Maillard reactions while the egg sets; too little heat leaves it soggy and greasy, and too much burns the outside before the egg cooks.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, milk, pepper, bread, butter, tomato, sauce):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Plumfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, pepper, bread, butter, tomato, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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