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
Cook the bacon
Cut the bacon into very thin slices and fry until crisp.
Remove the bacon and keep it hot in the oven.
Fry the eggs and serve
Break the eggs separately into the hot fat and fry until brown.
Serve the eggs over the bacon with small fried snippets of bread placed 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 the eggs and adds salty, savory flavor and crisp texture.
- Eggs
- Set in the hot fat to form the main body of the dish and add richness.
- Sippets of bread
- Fried bread adds a crunchy texture that contrasts with the soft eggs.
The step that matters
Breaking the eggs separately into the hot fat. Cracking each egg into its own spot keeps the yolks intact and prevents whites from running together. Hot fat sets the whites quickly, so frying too long can make the edges hard and dry.
“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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