Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓
Chocolate Pudding
Ingredients
Directions
The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.
Make the pudding
Scald the milk in a saucepan.
Add the bread crumbs and grated chocolate to the milk.
Remove from heat and stir in the sugar and egg yolks.
Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for about 30 minutes.
Top and serve
Beat the egg whites until stiff, sweeten them, and spread on top of the pudding.
Brown the top slightly under the broiler.
Serve hot with cream.
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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Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together11,466 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
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Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together15,404 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
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Milk + chocolatetop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together9,128 recipes
Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).
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Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together22,662 recipes
Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
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Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together88,785 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Egg yolks
- Enrich the custard and help it set as it bakes.
- Bread crumbs
- Thicken the milk and give the pudding its body.
- Egg whites
- Whipped to form a light, airy topping that puffs and browns.
- Grated chocolate
- Provides the chocolate flavor throughout the pudding.
- Sweet milk
- Forms the liquid base that the crumbs soften into and the custard sets from.
The step that matters
Beat the egg whites until stiff. Egg whites must be beaten to stiff peaks for the topping to hold its volume. Under-beaten whites collapse and weep, while sugar added after stiffening is hard to incorporate evenly, so the meringue-like layer may turn out flat or grainy.
“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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