Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓
Broiled Steak
Ingredients
Directions
The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.
Sear
Preheat an iron frying pan until very hot.
Place the steak in the pan and cook quickly on one side until light brown.
Flip the steak and cook on the other side until light brown.
Cook through
Cover the pan and reduce heat, cooking slowly until done.
If the steak is thick, transfer it to a 400°F (200°C) oven for 10 minutes to finish cooking.
Season and serve
Drain excess grease from the pan, season the steak with salt, pepper, and butter.
Serve the steak on a hot dish with its own gravy.
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.
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Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together85,593 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Porterhouse or sirloin steak
- Provides the meat itself, which browns on the outside while cooking to doneness inside.
- Butter
- Adds richness and flavor at the end, rounding out the seared surface.
The step that matters
Searing the first side quickly in a very hot pan. A very hot pan browns the surface through the Maillard reaction, building flavor and a crust while the inside stays juicy. If the pan is not hot enough, the steak steams and turns grey instead of browning.
“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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