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German Toast

A toasted bread dish fried in butter and coated with beaten eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

German Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the loaf bread into nice slices.

  2. Beat the eggs in a bowl.

Cook

  1. Dip each slice of bread in the beaten eggs, coating both sides.

  2. Fry the coated bread in hot butter until golden brown.

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. Bread + eggtop 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

Eggs
Bind to the bread and set when fried, giving the toast a custard-like coating.
Loaf bread
Forms the base that soaks up the beaten egg and becomes the toast body.
Butter
Conducts heat in the pan and browns the egg coating for flavour and colour.

The step that matters

Fry the coated bread in hot butter until golden brown. If the butter is not hot enough, the bread absorbs fat and turns greasy before the egg sets. Hot butter sets the coating quickly and drives browning, so the toast crisps outside while staying tender inside.

“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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