Why it works: Lentils and wheat share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 38 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓
Thick Lentil Soup
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Rinse the lentils and place them in a pot with enough water to cover.
Cook
Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until lentils are tender.
Add coarse sea salt to taste.
Thicken the soup with whole wheat meal, stirring until smooth.
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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Lentils + wheattop 6% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together38 recipes
Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Lentils
- Form the body of the soup and, once cooked, give it a soft, thick texture.
- Whole wheat meal
- Thickens the soup as its starch swells in the hot liquid, giving a smooth consistency.
The step that matters
Thicken the soup with whole wheat meal, stirring until smooth. Flour added to hot liquid can clump if dumped in at once. Stirring it in gradually, or whisking it into a little cold liquid first, lets the starch disperse so it thickens evenly.
“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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