Why it works: Egg and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 33% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,580 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Fried Egg Plant
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the eggplant
Peel and slice the egg plants thinly.
Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and let sit for 30 minutes.
Pat the slices dry.
Coat and fry
Dip each slice into the beaten egg yolk, then coat with grated cracker.
Fry in boiling lard until light brown, seasoning with pepper while cooking.
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.
Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it
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 + peppertop 33% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together50,580 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Eggplant (in the method)
- Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender when fried.
- Egg yolk
- Acts as a binder so the cracker coating adheres to the slices.
- Grated cracker
- Forms a crisp, golden coating that browns during frying.
- Boiling lard
- Conducts heat to cook the slices and promotes browning on the surface.
The step that matters
Pat the slices dry before coating. Surface moisture from the salted eggplant would steam under the coating and dilute the egg yolk, so the cracker would not adhere or crisp well in the hot lard.
“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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