Skip to main content
Main

How to Fry Dried Beef

A dish of thinly shaved dried beef fried in butter, then simmered in a flour‑stiffened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

How to Fry Dried Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shave the dried beef thinly using a plane.

  2. Heat a frying pan and add butter.

Make the gravy

  1. Fry the beef in the hot butter until browned.

  2. Stir in 1 tablespoon of flour.

  3. Pour in enough hot water to create a gravy.

  4. Let it stew for a moment before serving.

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.

  1. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Dried beef
Provides the main savoury flavour and meaty body of the dish.
Butter
Fat that fries the beef, carrying flavour and promoting browning.
Flour
Thickens the cooking juices and butter into a gravy.

The step that matters

Browning the beef in the hot butter. Searing the thin shavings in hot fat triggers browning reactions that build savoury, roasted flavour. If the pan is crowded or not hot enough, the beef steams and turns grey and chewy instead.

“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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes