Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓
Croutons No. I
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Slice the stale bread and remove the crust.
Cut the bread into small dice.
Fry and serve
Heat butter in a pan until boiling.
Drop the bread into the hot butter and shake frequently until light golden-brown, about 1 minute.
Remove the croutons with a skimmer onto brown paper in the oven to dry.
Serve on a cut paper with tomato soup or any other purée.
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 + buttertop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together27,232 recipes
Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Stale bread
- Its drier crumb crisps rather than turns soggy when fried, giving the croutons their structure.
- Butter
- Fat that conducts heat to the bread, promoting even browning and adding rich flavour.
The step that matters
Frying the bread in hot butter. The butter is near boiling and the bread can go from golden to dark quickly. Shaking frequently keeps the pieces moving so they brown evenly and do not burn.
“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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