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Baked Sweetbreads

Baked sweetbreads coated in breadcrumbs and butter, served with toast and brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Baked Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Soak the sweetbreads in warm water for over an hour to draw out blood and improve color.

  2. Boil the sweetbreads for about 10 minutes to firm them up.

  3. Drain the sweetbreads.

Coat and bake

  1. Brush the sweetbreads with egg.

  2. Sprinkle the sweetbreads with bread crumbs.

  3. Dip the sweetbreads in egg again.

  4. Coat the sweetbreads with more bread crumbs.

  5. Dot the sweetbreads with oiled butter.

  6. Bake the sweetbreads in a 350°F (175°C) oven for nearly 45 minutes.

Serve

  1. Prepare 3 slices of toast.

  2. Place the sweetbreads on top of the toast.

  3. Pour brown gravy around the sweetbreads.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Main protein; boiling firms them so they hold their shape during coating and baking.
Egg
Acts as a binder so the bread crumbs stick to the sweetbreads.
Bread crumbs
Forms a crisp, golden coating that protects the sweetbreads while they bake.
Oiled butter
Adds fat that promotes browning and a rich flavor on the crumb coating.

The step that matters

Boiling the sweetbreads. Boiling firms the tissue so it holds its shape under the coating and in the oven. Boiling too long or too hard can make the sweetbreads tough and dry, so timing matters.

“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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