Name: Meat-bread
Ingredients: 1% raw beef, chopped fine; 2 to 2½ cups flour; water; yeast; coarse sea salt (to taste); optional: salt lard

Why it works: Beef and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Meat-bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Make a ferment with water and yeast.

Make and bake the bread

Mix the chopped beef with flour and the ferment.
Knead the dough as you would for ordinary bread.
Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) until done.

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.

Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together10,677 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Beef and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 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

Raw beef: Supplies the meat that is mixed into the dough, giving the bread its savoury filling.
Flour: Forms the dough structure that holds the meat and ferment together.
Yeast: Ferments the dough so it rises and develops a lighter crumb.

“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.