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Hamburg Steak

A ground beef patty seasoned with pepper and salt, served with onion sauce and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Hamburg Steak

Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Hamburg Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Grind the beef and kidney suet together using a medium knife.

  2. Season the mixture with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Form the mixture into small cakes.

Cook the cakes

  1. Cook the cakes in a hot skillet with a little pork fat.

Make the onion sauce

  1. Boil the onions until tender.

  2. Drain and sieve the onions.

  3. Season the sieved onions with salt and pepper.

  4. Stir in the flour.

  5. Add the onion sauce to the gravy in the skillet after removing the cakes.

  6. Bring the sauce to a boil.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the cakes 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Beef + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,448 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Bottom round beef
Provides the main meat body and flavor of the steak cakes.
Kidney suet
Adds fat that keeps the ground meat cakes moist and tender while cooking.
Onions
Become soft and sweet when boiled, then sieved to thicken and flavor the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sieved onion mixture into a smooth sauce.

The step that matters

Bring the sauce to a boil. Flour must be heated fully in the liquid to thicken the sauce and cook out its raw starchy taste, so the sauce should be brought to a full boil.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, pork, tomato, flour):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, pork, tomato, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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