Why it works: Coffee and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,202 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓
Essence of Coffee
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the coffee
Burn a pound of coffee to a light chestnut color and pound it in a mortar.
Sift the coffee and divide it into three quart bottles.
Bottle and clarify
Fill the bottles with cold water to within three inches of the rims and cork them tightly.
Boil the bottles in a bain-marie until cool.
Let the coffee stand for two days to clarify.
Make the second and third batches
For a second batch, use the coffee from the first batch and boil it for six minutes.
Repeat the process of bottling and cooling as before.
For a third batch, use the second batch's coffee and boil it again, then cool and bottle.
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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Coffee + milktop 10% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together2,202 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
- Coffee
- Provides the main flavor, and repeated boiling and standing is used to clarify it.
“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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