Name: Beef Tea
Ingredients: 1 pound minced beef; 1 pint cold water; pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Beef and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Beef Tea

Ingredients

1 pound minced beef
1 pint cold water
pepper to taste
coarse sea salt to taste

Directions

Make the beef tea

Combine minced beef and cold water in a pot.
Bring to a boil and cook for 15 minutes.
Drain the mixture thoroughly.

Season and serve

Season the beef tea with pepper and coarse sea salt.

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 + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,971 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

Minced beef: Supplies the meat flavour and body that is drawn into the cooking liquid.
Cold water: Acts as the liquid that extracts flavour from the beef as it heats.

“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.