Why it works: Beef and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,278 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓
Raw-beef Juice
Ingredients
Directions
The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.
Prepare the beef
Warm the beef in a broiler before a 400°F (200°C) fire.
Cut the beef into cubes about ¼ inch in size.
Press the juice
Place the cubes in a lemon squeezer or meat press.
Forcefully express the juice from the beef.
Remove the fat that rises to the surface after cooling.
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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Beef + lemontop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together4,278 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Sirloin of beef
- Supplies the meat juice that is pressed out, and the fat that rises as it cools.
The step that matters
Warm the beef only briefly. Heat makes the muscle proteins firm and tighten, which squeezes out less juice. Brief warming loosens the meat without cooking it through, so more liquid can be pressed out.
“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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