Name: Stuffed Beefsteak
Ingredients: 1 good-sized tender steak; bread stuffing (like turkey dressing); coarse sea salt; black pepper; water

Why it works: Bread and turkey work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 822 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Stuffed Beefsteak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Trim the steak nicely and spread it with bread stuffing.
Roll the steak up and fasten it with skewers.
Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

Bake

Bake in a dripping pan with a little water.

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.

Bread + turkeytop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together822 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Turkey + peppertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,636 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,964 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Steak: Forms the main body of the dish and provides the meat that is cooked through.
Bread stuffing: Fills the rolled steak, adding moisture and savory flavor as it cooks.

“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.