Name: Baked Sot Beans
Ingredients: ½ cup yellow soy beans; 2 tablespoons pork

Why it works: Beans and pork are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,000 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Baked Sot Beans

Ingredients

½ cup yellow soy beans
2 tablespoons pork

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Soak the yellow soy beans in water for 48 hours.
Boil the soaked beans for about 30 minutes.

Bake

Combine the boiled beans with the pork in a baking dish.
Bake in a 300°F (150°C) oven for 12 hours.

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.

Beans + porktop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,000 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Yellow soy beans: Form the bulk of the dish, providing protein and starch that set into a firm, tender texture.
Pork: Adds fat and savory flavor that carries into the beans during the long slow bake.

“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.