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Beef Olives

Beef olives are small, thin pieces of round steak stuffed with bacon and onions, browned and boiled in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Beef Olives

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the olives

  1. Cut the round steak into small, thin pieces.

  2. Pound the steak and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Cut small pieces of bacon and onions.

  4. Roll the bacon and onions inside the pieces of steak.

Cook

  1. Brown the stuffed steak pieces in a pan.

  2. Place the browned steak in a kettle with 1 cup of water.

  3. Boil for 2.5 hours.

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. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 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

Round steak
Forms the outer wrap and provides the meat that becomes tender during long simmering.
Bacon
Adds fat and savory flavor that bastes the meat from inside as it cooks.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma that perfume the filling and the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Boil for 2.5 hours. Round steak is a tough cut with lots of connective tissue. A long, gentle simmer in liquid is needed to break it down; stopping early leaves the meat chewy. Keep the liquid at a gentle simmer so the meat stays moist rather than drying out.

“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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