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Braised Steak

Braised steak cooked slowly with butter, stock, onions, pepper, salt, and optional vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Braised Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the steak

  1. Heat the butter in a large saucepan until hot.

  2. Add the steak, either whole or cut into 2-inch pieces, and brown it nicely.

  3. Add the onions cut into quarters, pepper, and salt.

Simmer

  1. Pour the stock into the saucepan, cover it well, and let it simmer slowly for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  2. If the steak is cut into pieces, simmer for 45 minutes instead.

  3. Optional: Add yam, sweet potatoes, carrots, or turnips during cooking as specified.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Steak
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender during slow simmering.
Butter or lard
Fat that carries heat for browning the steak and adds richness.
Stock
Liquid that keeps the steak moist and helps soften it during long simmering.
Onions
Become sweet and aromatic as they cook slowly in the pan and liquid.

The step that matters

Brown the steak nicely. Browning creates deep flavor through the Maillard reaction, which happens only on a hot, fairly dry surface. Crowding the pan or adding liquid too early steams the meat and leaves it pale and bland.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, parsley):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, parsley. 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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