Why it works: Coffee and syrup work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 318 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓
Coffee Syrup
Ingredients
Directions
Make the coffee
Make a strong decoction of Mocha coffee until clear, yielding 1 pint.
Make the syrup
In a pot, boil 2 pints of syrup until it reaches a ball stage.
Add the coffee to the syrup and return it to the heat.
Boil the mixture until it reaches a pearl stage.
Strain the syrup through a cloth and bottle it when cold.
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 + syruptop 15% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together318 recipes
Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Coffee
- Provides the main coffee flavour and aroma of the syrup.
- Syrup
- Provides sweetness and body, and carries the coffee flavour.
The step that matters
Boiling the mixture to the pearl stage after adding the coffee. Sugar syrup thickens as water boils off and its concentration rises. Stopping at the right stage controls the final thickness, and the syrup thickens further as it cools, so stopping too late can make it stiff.
“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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