When annealed, thin amorphous deposits of highly lattice mismatched materials provide specular crystalline surfaces for epitaxy. Mismatch strain is predominantly relieved by misfit dislocations propagating in the plane of the interface, so that resulting films have low threading dislocation densities. We demonstrate the application of this concept to the growth of (001) oriented CdTe epitaxy on (001) GaAs. (C) 1995 American Institute of Physics.