Name: Roast Potatoes with Beef
Ingredients: sweet potatoes or white potatoes; beef

Why it works: Sweet potato and beef work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 145 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Roast Potatoes with Beef

Ingredients

sweet potatoes or white potatoes
beef

Directions

Pare the potatoes and place them in the roasting pan with the beef.
Baste the potatoes when you baste the beef.
Bake until the potatoes are tender and browned.

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.

Sweet potato + beeftop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together145 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes: Starchy flesh turns tender and fluffy inside while the outside browns and crisps in the oven.
Beef: Fat and juices from the beef drip into the pan, adding flavour and moisture to the potatoes.

“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.