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Soup

Beef Tea

A clear broth made by simmering minced beef in water, seasoned with salt and optionally colored with roasted onion or burnt sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,092 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Beef Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mince the beef very small.

  2. Mix the minced beef with the cold water.

Make the tea

  1. Heat the mixture slowly to boiling.

  2. Once boiling, strain through a cloth.

Season and color

  1. Add salt to taste and color with roasted onion or burnt sugar if desired.

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 + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 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

Lean beef
Supplies the meat flavor and dissolved proteins that give the tea its body.

The step that matters

Heat the mixture slowly to boiling. Gentle heating from cold water draws flavor and juices out of the minced beef gradually. Rapid, hard boiling tends to make the liquid cloudy and can leave the flavor less clear.

“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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