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Jools’s Favourite Beef Stew

Jools goes mad for this stew in the colder months of the year, and the kids love it too. It's a straightforward beef stew to which all sorts of root veg can be added. I really like making it with squash and Jerusalem artichokes, which partly cook into the sauce, making it really sumptuous with an unusual and wonderful flavour. The great thing about this stew is that it gets put together very quickly, and this is partly to do with the fact that no time is spent browning the meat. Even though this goes against all my training, I experimented with two batches of meat – I browned one and put the other straight into the pot. The latter turned out to be the sweeter and cleaner-tasting, so I've stopped browning the meat for most of my stews these days.

By jamieoliver · From Open Recipes · 19 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and jerusalem artichoke share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and 12 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

The recipe

Serves 4

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 jamieoliver. 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. Parsnip + jerusalem artichoketop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together12 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sage + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Onion + beeftop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together17,091 recipes

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

  4. Beef + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together18,971 recipes

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

  5. Sage + parsniptop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together62 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the parsnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (olive, butter, onion, sage, beef, pepper, flour):

  1. Potatobetter flavor fit
  2. Tomatobetter flavor fit
  3. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  4. Parsnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, butter, onion, sage, beef, pepper, flour. 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).