Why it works: Butter and crayfish work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 343 recipes. Both carry anethole, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓
Crayfish Butter
Ingredients
Directions
Cook the crayfish with mirepoix.
Remove the tails and finely pound the shells.
Mix the pounded shells with butter in a 3:2 ratio.
Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.
Add a little cochineal for color.
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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Butter + crayfishtop 11% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together343 recipes
Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Butter
- Carries the shell flavour and gives the sauce its rich, smooth body.
- Crayfish shells
- Provide the concentrated shellfish aroma and flavour that the butter absorbs.
- Mirepoix
- Adds aromatic vegetable sweetness and depth while the crayfish cooks.
The step that matters
Rub the mixture through a fine sieve. Pounded shell fragments are gritty; pressing the butter mixture through a fine sieve removes them and leaves a smooth sauce.
“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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