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Planked Whitefish

Whitefish cooked on a soaked wooden plank in oven or broiler, served with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Whitefish and butter work together. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Planked Whitefish

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Clean the fish and remove the backbone and as many smaller bones as possible.

  2. Soak a wooden plank in water to prevent burning.

  3. Lay the fish on the soaked plank, skin side down.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the plank in the oven at 400°F (200°C) or in the broiler until the fish is tender and slightly browned.

  2. Serve with melted butter or maitre d'hotel butter.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

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.

  1. Whitefish + buttertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Whitefish
Forms the main body of the dish; its flesh cooks to a tender, flaky texture.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture when served melted over the cooked fish.

The step that matters

Soak the wooden plank. A wet plank resists scorching in the oven or broiler, and the water it holds steams the underside of the fish, helping keep it moist while the surface browns.

“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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