Why it works: Licorice and anise work together. They rank in the top 28% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15 recipes. Both carry alpha-terpineol, which smells lilac, floral. The science ↓
Licorice Gums
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the licorice
Break up the licorice paste into small pieces and soak it overnight.
Melt the soaked licorice paste in a kettle.
Make the gums
While cooking a batch of No. 3 hard gums, add the melted licorice.
Once done, color the mixture black with powdered charcoal mixed with alcohol.
Add oil of anise to taste and run the mixture in warm starch.
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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Licorice + anisetop 28% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together15 recipes
Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Licorice paste
- Provides the main flavor and the dark body of the gums.
- No. 3 hard gums
- Forms the base mass that the licorice is blended into.
- Powdered charcoal
- Colors the mixture black without changing its structure.
The step that matters
Adding the melted licorice to the hard gum batch. The licorice must be fully melted and evenly blended into the cooking gum mass so the color and flavor distribute uniformly instead of forming streaks or lumps once the gums set.
“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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