Why it works: Lobster and meat work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 909 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓
Lobster Salad
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Boil the lobster and carefully remove the meat from the shell.
Chop the lobster meat.
Serve
Serve the chopped lobster with mayonnaise dressing.
Garnish with parsley.
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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Lobster + meattop 14% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together909 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
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Meat + parsleytop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together3,040 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
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Lobster + parsleytop 24% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together890 recipes
Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Lobster meat
- Provides the main protein and the sweet, tender texture of the salad.
- Mayonnaise dressing
- Adds fat and creaminess that moistens the chopped lobster and binds it together.
The step that matters
Boil the lobster and remove the meat carefully. Overcooking makes lobster meat tough and rubbery, while careless removal from the shell leaves fragments of shell in the salad. Cooking just until the shell turns red and the meat turns opaque keeps it tender.
Swap the parsley
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, meat):
- Capersfits better
- Tarragonfits about as well
- Celeryfits about as well
- Parsleythe original
Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, meat. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.
“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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