Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓
Chicken Broth
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Pluck, clean, and draw the fowl.
Wash the fowl carefully and place it in a pot with water and a little coarse sea salt.
Cook and thicken
Cover the pot tightly and cook slowly for 3 hours.
To thicken the broth, roll flour and butter into the shape of an egg and dissolve it in the boiling broth.
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.
Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it
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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Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
- Fowl
- Provides the meat and flavour that give the broth its body and taste.
- Flour
- Thickens the broth as it dissolves and swells in the hot liquid.
- Butter
- Adds richness and fat, rounding out the flavour and smoothing the broth.
The step that matters
Dissolving the flour and butter ball. If the flour and butter are dropped in without being rolled smoothly, they can clump. Dissolving them into boiling broth lets the starch swell evenly and thicken the liquid without lumps.
“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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