Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Fried Plaice
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Heat the clarified dripping in a saucepan over medium heat.
Wash the plaice in cold water and dry it with a cloth.
Place the plaice on a cutting board and carefully cut off the head and tail.
Cut the fish into slices or fillets.
Grate bread crumbs onto a piece of paper.
Break the egg into a plate and beat it lightly.
Coat and fry
Dip the fish slices into the egg, coating them well.
Roll the egg-coated fish in the bread crumbs, ensuring they are fully covered.
Shake off any loose crumbs.
Once the dripping is hot and smoking, carefully add the fish, avoiding touching it too much.
Fry the fish in batches, ensuring they do not touch each other.
Drain and serve
Place a piece of white paper on a plate and transfer the fried fish onto it to drain excess grease.
Serve the fish on a hot dish, garnished with sprigs of parsley.
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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Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together22,662 recipes
Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Plaice
- Forms the main body of the dish, cooked through by frying in dripping.
- Egg
- Binds the bread crumbs to the fish so the coating adheres during frying.
- Bread crumbs
- Form a crisp, golden coating that browns and seals the fish in hot fat.
- Clarified dripping
- Conducts heat for frying and gives the coating a rich, browned flavour and crisp texture.
The step that matters
Adding the fish to the hot dripping. The fat must be hot and smoking before the fish goes in. Hot fat sets the crumb coating quickly so it crisps rather than soaking up grease. Crowding the pan drops the fat temperature and makes the coating greasy and soggy.
“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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