Skip to main content

Beef Chili + Sour Cream and Cheddar Biscuits

Abruptly, and likely surprising nobody more than my husband, I have decided to be a Good Football Wife this year. Finding it impossible to summon any actual enthusiasm for the game but refusing to fulfill the sitcom wife-cliché of grumbling about my husband’s Sunday afternoon routines, in the past, I’ve mostly tolerated it. But with months of cold and/or wet Sundays ahead of us, I finally came to the realization that football season is the perfect excuse to embrace some much-needed Lazy Sundays. A morning bagel, park and farmers market run routine segues nicely into an afternoon of bumming around, or you know, however the person at hand defines it. For Alex, football, with the requisite pre- and post-game Sports Shouting episodes. For Jacob, removing books from the bookcases one by one, then attempting to stand on them to reach higher shelves, so he can remove them too. He naps, we replace the books, he wakes up and starts again. Ah, Sundays.

By smittenkitchen · From Open Recipes · 25 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cheddar cheese and kidney beans match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and 139 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Step-by-step directions aren't available for this recipe. See the full recipe at the source →

By smittenkitchen. Recipe from Open Recipes.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Cheddar cheese + kidney beanstop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together139 recipes

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

  2. Cumin + oreganotop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together29,030 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Carrot + cumintop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together776 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Oregano + tomatotop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,767 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (garlic, carrot, beef, cumin, oregano, pepper, tomato):

  1. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  2. Potatoabout as good a flavor fit
  3. Eggplantabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against garlic, carrot, beef, cumin, oregano, pepper, tomato. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).