Why it works: Pear and pepper work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 320 recipes. Both carry butanol, which smells wine. The science ↓
Vegetable Pear
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Slice the vegetable pear in half and remove the seeds.
Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and pepper.
Cook and serve
Heat oil in a pan over medium heat.
Fry the halves until golden brown and tender.
Serve hot as a side dish.
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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Pear + peppertop 19% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together320 recipes
Shared aroma: butanol (wine).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Vegetable pear (mirliton)
- Provides the main body of the dish, becoming tender when fried.
- Oil
- Conducts heat to the surface, helping the halves brown and crisp.
The step that matters
Fry the halves until golden brown and tender. Frying over medium heat lets the surface brown through Maillard reactions while the interior softens. Too high a heat can scorch the outside before the flesh is tender.
“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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