Why it works: Butter and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,456 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓
New Potatoes
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Wash and scrape the potatoes, then wipe them dry.
Cook
Warm the butter in a stewpan and add the potatoes, ensuring they are not stacked on top of each other.
Cook the potatoes very slowly for 45 minutes.
When half done, add a little coarse sea salt.
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 + potatotop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together6,456 recipes
Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- New potatoes
- Provide the starchy body of the dish, cooking gently to a tender interior.
- Butter or dripping
- Adds fat that carries flavour and helps the potatoes brown gently in the pan.
The step that matters
Cooking the potatoes very slowly without stacking them. Potatoes laid in a single layer with space between them cook evenly and gently. Stacking traps steam and uneven heat, leaving some pieces soft or pale and others scorched, and the slow heat keeps the interior tender before the surface colours.
“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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