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Drink

How to Make Iced Tea

A chilled tea beverage made by steeping tea leaves, cooling, and adding ice and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Tea and lemon work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 610 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

How to Make Iced Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Brew

  1. Use 1¼ times the usual amount of dry tea leaves for the desired strength.

  2. Pour boiling water over the tea leaves and steep for 5 minutes.

Cool and serve

  1. Pour off the tea and let it cool gradually at room temperature.

  2. Add ice and lemon just before serving.

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. Tea + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Dry tea leaves
Provide the main flavour, colour and tannin bitterness of the drink.
Boiling water
Extracts flavour and colour compounds from the tea leaves during steeping.
Ice
Chills the tea quickly and dilutes it slightly as it melts.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the tea's flavour.

The step that matters

Let the tea cool gradually at room temperature. Chilling hot tea too quickly can make it cloudy, because tea compounds such as polyphenols and caffeine bind together and form a haze. Slow cooling keeps the tea clear before ice is added.

“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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