Why it works: Meat and barley work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 224 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓
Making Soup
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Combine left-over bits of meat and bones in a large saucepan.
Add enough cold water to cover the ingredients.
Stir in coarse sea salt to taste.
Add 1 cup of barley.
Simmer and finish
Simmer and boil for several hours, adding more water as needed and stirring occasionally.
Once the soup is ready, remove from heat and let cool.
Skim off any fat that rises to the surface.
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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Meat + barleytop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together224 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Barley
- Swells as it cooks, thickening the broth and giving the soup body and chew.
- Bones
- Release gelatin and flavour into the water during long simmering, enriching the broth.
- Left-over bits of meat
- Contribute savoury, meaty flavour to the broth as they simmer.
The step that matters
Simmer and boil for several hours, adding more water as needed. Long, gentle simmering extracts flavour and gelatin from bones and meat. If the liquid reduces too far, the solids stay exposed and the broth becomes concentrated and thick, so water must be topped up.
“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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