Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓
Broiled Mushrooms
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Wash the mushrooms and remove the stems.
Broil
Place the caps in a buttered broiler, cap side down, and broil for 5 minutes.
Add a small piece of butter to each cap, then sprinkle with salt and pepper.
Serve
Serve immediately once the butter is melted, keeping the caps down to retain juices, on rounds of buttered dry toast.
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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Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together12,525 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
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Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together13,580 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together85,593 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Mushrooms
- Form the main body of the dish and release juices that collect in the caps while broiling.
- Butter
- Adds richness and moisture, melting into the caps and carrying flavour as it browns slightly.
The step that matters
Broil the caps cap side down. Mushrooms are mostly water. Cooking cap side down keeps their released juices inside the cap, so the mushrooms stay moist and flavourful. Leaving them too long under the broiler dries them out and shrinks them.
“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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