Name: Rolled Steak
Ingredients: 1 round steak; pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste; bread crumbs

Why it works: Pepper and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,964 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rolled Steak

Ingredients

1 round steak
pepper to taste
coarse sea salt to taste
bread crumbs

Directions

Prepare

Pound the round steak and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.
Make a dressing with the bread crumbs and spread it over the top of the steak.
Roll the steak and tie it with string.

Roast

Place in a pan and roast for 40 minutes.

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.

Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Round steak: Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender enough to slice when rolled and roasted.
Bread crumbs: Make up the dressing that adds bulk and absorbs juices inside the rolled steak.

“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.