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Fried Sweetbreads

Fried sweetbreads are sweetbreads soaked, boiled, sliced, coated with egg and breadcrumbs, then fried and served with 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 ↓

Fried Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the sweetbreads in warm water with ½ teaspoon of salt for 1 hour to whiten them.

  2. Transfer the sweetbreads to cold water and boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Slice the sweetbreads.

Coat and fry

  1. Brush the slices with egg.

  2. Sprinkle the slices with bread crumbs.

  3. Fry in 2 tablespoons of butter until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with gravy prepared for poultry.

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; its tender, mild texture is the body of the dish.
Egg
Binds the bread crumbs to the slices so the coating holds during frying.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned crust when fried in butter.
Butter
Fat that conducts heat for frying and adds browning and rich flavour.

The step that matters

Frying until golden brown. Butter browns quickly at high heat and can burn before the crumb coating crisps. Frying at a steady heat and watching colour lets the Maillard reaction brown the crust evenly while the inside stays moist.

“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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