Why it works: Bread and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
German Toast
Ingredients
Directions
Make the egg coating
Beat the eggs in a bowl.
Dip the sliced bread into the beaten eggs.
Fry
Fry the egg-coated bread in hot sweet lard until golden brown.
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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Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together22,662 recipes
Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Eggs
- Bind to the bread and set when fried, forming a golden, structured coating.
- Sliced bread
- Soaks up the beaten egg and becomes the crisp, golden-browned body of the toast.
- Sweet lard
- Conducts heat for frying and promotes browning of the egg-coated bread.
The step that matters
Frying in hot lard. The fat must be hot enough to set the egg quickly and brown the surface; if it is too cool, the bread soaks up grease and turns soggy instead of crisp.
“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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