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Beef Essence

A liquid made by steaming beef pieces and straining the resulting broth, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Beef Essence

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Trim all fat and gristle from the beef using a sharp knife.

  2. Cut the lean beef into small pieces and place them in a jar.

  3. Cover the jar and tie a piece of paper over it.

Steam

  1. Fill a saucepan half full with boiling water and place it on the stove.

  2. Stand the jar in the saucepan of boiling water to steam for two hours, ensuring the water does not cover the jar.

Strain and season

  1. After steaming, place a strainer over a basin.

  2. Strain the liquid into the basin and season with salt and pepper to taste.

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 + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 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

Gravy beef
Provides the meat flavour and the savoury liquid that is extracted during steaming.

The step that matters

Keeping the water below the jar's rim while steaming. If the water covers the jar, it boils into the contents and dilutes the broth, and the gentle steam heat is lost. Keeping the water level below the jar lets the beef release its juices slowly and cleanly.

“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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