Why it works: Pork and sweet potato work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 235 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓
To Stew Pork
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the pork
Rub the pork with a little coarse sea salt and score the skin.
Stew
Place the pork in a pot and cover it with sufficient water.
Stew gently for 2 hours or more, depending on the size of the pork.
Add the sweet potatoes to the pot and stew together for an additional 1.5 hours, stirring occasionally.
Serve everything together in a large dish.
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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Pork + sweet potatotop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together235 recipes
Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Pork fillet or leg
- Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle stewing.
- Sweet potatoes
- Add starchy body and natural sweetness as they soften in the stew.
The step that matters
Stewing gently. Gentle heat over a long time breaks down the connective tissue in the pork so it becomes tender. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and break up the sweet potatoes.
“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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