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Battered Chicken

A dish of chicken pieces coated in an egg, butter, flour, and salt batter and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,373 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Battered Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, whisk together the eggs, butter, flour, and salt until smooth.

  2. Coat the jointed chicken pieces in the batter.

Fry

  1. Grease a frying pan and heat it over medium-high heat.

  2. Add the battered chicken to the pan and fry until golden brown.

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.

  1. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Wheat + chickentop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together296 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Butter + wheattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Butter + chickentop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set and hold onto the chicken as it cooks.
Wheat flour
Forms the body of the batter, helping it cling to the chicken and crisp as it fries.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the coating brown evenly.
Whole chickens, jointed
The main protein, coated in batter and fried until cooked through.

The step that matters

Fry until golden brown over medium-high heat. Batter-coated chicken can burn on the outside before the meat inside is cooked through. Steady medium-high heat browns the coating while the thicker pieces cook through.

“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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