Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Fried Eels
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Cut the cleaned eels into three-inch pieces.
Sprinkle the eels with coarse sea salt and let them stand for an hour.
Rinse off the salt.
Bread and fry
Dip the eels in the beaten egg.
Roll the eels in bread crumbs.
Fry the eels in boiling fat until golden brown.
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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Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together22,662 recipes
Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Eels
- The main protein; the pieces are cooked through by frying in hot fat.
- Beaten egg
- Acts as a glue so the bread crumbs adhere to the eels.
- Bread crumbs
- Form a crisp coating that browns in the hot fat.
The step that matters
Frying in boiling fat until golden brown. The fat must be hot enough to brown the crumb coating quickly. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs excess fat and turns greasy before the eel is cooked 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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