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 ↓
To Poach Eggs
Ingredients
Directions
Poach the eggs
Fill a shallow saucepan or frying pan half full of clean water and add some coarse sea salt.
Break each egg into a separate tea cup and gently slip it into the water.
Allow a little water to enter the cup to help set the egg before it lies freely in the water.
Cook the egg in water at boiling point for about 1 minute, ensuring the yolk remains liquid in the center of the white.
Serve on toast
Prepare buttered toasted bread cut into pieces larger than the egg.
Carefully lift the eggs with a small slice, trim any ragged edges, and place them on the bread.
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
- Eggs
- Egg white sets around the yolk, forming the poached body while the yolk stays runny.
- Buttered toasted bread
- Provides a crisp, buttery base that contrasts with the soft egg and absorbs its runny yolk.
The step that matters
Cook at boiling point for about 1 minute. Egg white proteins set with heat, so too short a cook leaves the white milky and too long a cook firms the yolk. Timing keeps the yolk liquid while the white sets.
“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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