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How to Prepare Hamburg Steak

A dish of chopped beef mixed with onion, water, flour, eggs, and salt pork.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

How to Prepare Hamburg Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Make the onion base

  1. Boil the chopped onion in 1 cup of water with the clove.

  2. Thicken the mixture with flour.

Combine and season

  1. Add 1 or 2 eggs and season to taste.

  2. Mix thoroughly with 2 pounds of chopped beef and salt pork.

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 + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + porktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Clove + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,671 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Chopped beef
Supplies the meat and fat that give the steak its savoury flavour and body.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together and set when cooked, helping the steak hold its shape.
Flour
Thickens the onion liquid, which helps the mixture cling together.
Onion
Adds moisture and mild sweetness that keep the steak from drying out.

The step that matters

Mix thoroughly with the beef. Mix the beef just until the onion mixture, eggs and seasoning are evenly combined. Ground meat worked too hard becomes dense and tough, because its proteins bind into a firm network.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, flour, egg, beef, pork):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Jalapenofits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, flour, egg, beef, pork. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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