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 ↓
Eggs and Bacon
Ingredients
Directions
Fry the bacon
Cut the bacon into very thin slices and fry until crisp.
Remove the bacon and keep it warm in the oven.
Cook and serve
Break the eggs separately into the hot fat and fry until brown.
Serve the eggs over the bacon with small fried slices of bread arranged around.
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
- Bacon
- Renders fat for frying and adds salty, savoury flavour as it crisps.
- Eggs
- Set into soft whites and firm yolks, forming the main body of the dish.
- Bread
- Fried slices absorb rendered fat, adding crunch and a toasted, golden flavour.
The step that matters
Frying the eggs in the hot fat. Breaking each egg into hot fat separately keeps whites from spreading into one another and lets the whites set while the yolks stay soft. Cooking too hot browns the edges before the whites are set.
“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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