Name: Baked Beef Steak
Ingredients: 1 flank or round steak; coarse sea salt; 1 cup bread crumbs; 1 egg; seasoning to taste

Why it works: Bread and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Baked Beef Steak

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Place the steak in a baking pan and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

Coat and bake

In a bowl, mix the bread crumbs, egg, and seasoning.
Cover the steak with the bread crumb mixture.
Bake for 30 to 45 minutes.

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 + eggtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together22,662 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Flank or round steak: Provides the meat that is cooked through in the oven under the crumb coating.
Bread crumbs: Form a crisp, browned crust over the steak as they bake.
Egg: Binds the bread crumbs together so they adhere to the steak.

“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.