Name: Hot Beef Tea
Ingredients: 2 teaspoons beef extract; 1 cup hot water; coarse sea salt to taste; black pepper to taste

Why it works: Beef and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Hot Beef Tea

Ingredients

2 teaspoons beef extract
1 cup hot water
coarse sea salt to taste
black pepper to taste

Directions

Put beef extract into a cup.
Pour hot water into the cup and stir well.
Add coarse sea salt and black pepper to taste.

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.

Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,971 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

Beef extract: Provides the concentrated beef flavour that forms the whole drink.
Hot water: Dissolves the beef extract and turns it into a drinkable liquid.

“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.