Name: Baked Taro
Ingredients: Taro; Butter; Coarse sea salt

Why it works: Taro and butter work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Baked Taro

Ingredients

Taro
Butter
Coarse sea salt

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Cut the skin from the taro and, if large, cut it in half.

Bake and serve

Place the taro in the oven and bake for 1 hour.
Break the baked taro into individual pieces by hand.
Serve with butter and coarse sea salt.

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.

Taro + buttertop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Taro: Is the starchy main ingredient; baking turns its flesh soft, creamy, and tender.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, coating the warm taro and softening its mild flavour.

“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.