Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓
Good Hash
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Remove bones and gristle from cold meat and grind it using a meat cutter.
Wash and boil potatoes with skins on, then grind them with the meat.
Mix and cook
Moisten the mixture with a little milk or gravy and season with salt.
Add a little butter or sweet fresh drippings and cook for several minutes.
Spread the mixture in a greased pie tin and bake until golden brown.
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.
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Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together81,283 recipes
Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
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Potato + milktop 9% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together3,611 recipes
Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).
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Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together6,456 recipes
Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
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Meat + potatotop 14% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together786 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
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Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together7,594 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Cold meat
- Provides the main body and savoury flavour of the hash.
- Potatoes
- Add starch and bulk, giving the hash a soft, binding texture.
- Milk or gravy
- Adds moisture so the mixture holds together and does not dry out.
- Butter or sweet fresh drippings
- Adds fat for richer flavour and helps the surface brown.
The step that matters
Spread the mixture in a greased pie tin and bake until golden brown. Baking the mixture until golden brown relies on the Maillard reaction between surface proteins and sugars, which creates browned flavour. Pulling it too early leaves the top pale and bland.
“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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