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Koumiss

A fermented milk beverage made with wheat flour dough, millet flour, honey, beer yeast, and fresh milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and millet share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Koumiss

Ingredients

Directions

Ferment

  1. Mix the wheat flour dough, millet flour, honey, and beer yeast into a thin paste with milk.

  2. Place the mixture in a warm spot to ferment.

  3. Once fermented, put it into a linen bag and hang it in a covered jar with fresh milk.

  4. Let it stand for 24 hours at a temperature of 86°F to 90°F until the milk becomes acidic.

Finish and store

  1. Skim the mixture, decant, and agitate for an hour.

  2. Bottle and cork tightly, securing the corks with wire fastenings.

  3. Store in the refrigerator.

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. Wheat + millettop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together25 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Flour + millettop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together67 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Wheat + milktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  4. Wheat + honeytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together346 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Honey + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Wheat flour dough
Supplies the starter culture that ferments the milk.
Beer yeast
Drives fermentation, producing gas and flavour as the milk sours.
Honey
Provides sugars that feed the yeast and microbes during fermentation.
Millet flour
Adds starch and body to the thin paste that begins fermentation.
Fresh milk
Is the base that ferments and becomes acidic over the standing time.

The step that matters

Holding the temperature during the 24-hour stand. The culture works best within a warm range. Too cool and the milk sours slowly or not at all; too hot and the cultures can overwork and spoil the flavour. Keeping it between 86°F and 90°F helps the milk become acidic as intended.

Swap the millet

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (wheat, flour, honey, beer, milk):

  1. Almondfits about as well
  2. Walnutfits about as well
  3. Milletthe original
  4. Peanutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against wheat, flour, honey, beer, milk. 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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