Why it works: Haddock and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 200 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓
Haddock Boiled
Ingredients
Directions
Wash the haddock well.
Put the haddock in a pot of boiling water.
Boil for about 10 minutes after the water starts boiling.
Serve with egg sauce or cut into fillets.
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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Haddock + saucetop 1% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together200 recipes
Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
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Haddock + eggtop 28% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together492 recipes
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Egg + saucetop 39% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together10,895 recipes
Egg and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,895 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Haddock
- Forms the main body of the dish, becoming firm and flaky as it cooks in simmering water.
The step that matters
Boil for about 10 minutes after the water starts boiling. Timing the cook from when the water boils, rather than from when the fish goes in, keeps the flesh from overcooking. Overcooked fish turns dry and tough because heat squeezes moisture out of the proteins.
“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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