Why it works: Butter and fennel work together. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 647 recipes. Both carry anethole, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓
Fennel Sauce
Ingredients
Directions
Melt the butter in a saucepan.
Add the chopped fennel and stir well.
Cook for a few minutes until the fennel is tender.
Serve warm over your dish.
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 + fenneltop 27% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together647 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
- Melts to form the fat base that carries the flavour of the sauce.
- Fennel
- Adds a mild aniseed aroma and softens as it cooks into the 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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