Why it works: Grapefruit and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓
Grape-fruit Salad
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Peel the grapefruit and remove all the bitter white skin from the lobes.
Serve
Serve the grapefruit with or without lettuce, drizzled with French dressing.
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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Grapefruit + lettucetop 1% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together118 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Grapefruit
- Provides the fresh, tangy juice and segments that form the body of the salad.
- French dressing
- Adds sweetness, acidity and fat that moisten the fruit and carry flavour.
The step that matters
Remove all the white pith from the lobes. The white pith under the peel is bitter. Leaving any of it on the segments makes the salad taste harsh, so cut or peel back every layer until only the translucent fruit remains.
“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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