Name: Beef Steaks
Ingredients: fine sirloin steaks; coarse sea salt; pepper; butter; water

Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Beef Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Scrape the sirloin steaks and wipe them with a clean cloth.
Heat the bars of your grill and grease them.

Grill and serve

Place the steaks over clear coals and turn them frequently using a dish.
When done, season with pepper and coarse sea salt.
Baste with butter and add ⅓ cup of water.
Serve hot.

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 + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Fine sirloin steaks: The main protein, cooked over coals until done.
Butter: Adds richness and moisture to the surface when basted over the hot steaks.

“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.