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Best Way to Cook a Sirloin Steak

A sirloin steak cooked in butter and served with mushroom catsup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Best Way to Cook a Sirloin Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim the steak by removing skin and excess fat, leaving the bone.

  2. Beat the steak with a meat mallet.

  3. Warm a plate and cover over steam until hot.

Cook the steak

  1. Heat a frying pan until hot, then add butter and coat the pan.

  2. Place the steak in the pan and turn it every second for 5 minutes.

  3. Press half of the remaining butter into the steak with a knife, then season with salt and pepper.

  4. Turn the steak and repeat with the other half of the butter and season again.

Serve

  1. On the plate, add mushroom catsup and place the steak on top.

  2. To make gravy, add boiling water to the frying pan, swirl, and pour it on the side of the plate.

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 + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Sirloin steak
Forms the main body of the dish and is cooked directly in the pan.
Butter
Coats the pan and adds richness and browning to the steak surface.
Mushroom catsup
Adds concentrated savoury, umami flavour to the steak and plate.

The step that matters

Turning the steak every second for 5 minutes. Frequent turning cooks the steak more gently and evenly, so the outside does not burn before the centre reaches the desired doneness. Leaving it still lets one side scorch while the other stays underdone.

“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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