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To Clarify Beef Tea

A clarified beef broth made by adding beaten egg white, boiling, and straining through cheesecloth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and tea work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 417 recipes. Both carry 2-methyl-3-(methyldithio)furan, which smells thiamin, meat. The science ↓

To Clarify Beef Tea

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Add the beaten egg white to the cold beef tea.

  2. Heat the mixture until it comes to a boil.

  3. Strain the mixture through cheesecloth.

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. Beef + teatop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together417 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methyl-3-(methyldithio)furan (thiamin, meat).

  2. Beef + eggtop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

  3. Tea + eggtop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together821 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg white
Its proteins coagulate as the broth heats, trapping cloudy particles so they can be strained out for a clear result.
Beef tea
Forms the liquid base of the broth, providing the beef flavour being clarified.

The step that matters

Heat the mixture until it comes to a boil. The egg white must be stirred in cold and heated slowly so it forms a raft that gathers impurities; boiling too vigorously early can break up the raft and leave the broth cloudy.

“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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