Why it works: Egg and red wine work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and 539 recipes mention both. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓
The recipe
Ingredients
Contains: egg (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)
Directions
Prepare the wine
Draw out 4 or 5 bottles of red wine from a cask of 160 bottles.
Fine the wine
Mix the whites of the eggs with ½ bottle of the wine and beat well with birch twigs.
Pour this mixture into the cask through the bung-hole.
Stir the wine well with a stick, then pour in the remaining wine and stir again for a few minutes.
Replace the bung and let the wine rest for 4 to 5 days until clear.
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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.
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Egg + red winetop 22% of all pairsAroma overlapmoderateMentioned together539 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Egg whites
- Their proteins bind to suspended particles and tannins, carrying them down so the wine clears.
- Red wine
- The liquid being clarified; its tannins and colour are what the egg whites help settle out.
The step that matters
Stirring the egg white mixture into the whole cask. The egg white must be mixed thoroughly through the whole volume so it contacts every part of the wine. Uneven mixing leaves cloudy pockets that settle poorly, so the wine may not clear evenly.
“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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