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Dessert

Tapioca Ice

A dessert made by boiling tapioca with sugar and pineapple.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Sugar and pineapple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,841 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Tapioca Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the tapioca

  1. Soak the tapioca overnight.

  2. In the morning, place the soaked tapioca on the stove and bring to a boil.

  3. Once boiling, add the sugar and continue to boil until the mixture is clear.

Prepare the pineapple

  1. Prepare the pineapple by removing all specks.

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. Sugar + pineappletop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tapioca
Starch that swells and thickens with heat, turning the mixture translucent as it cooks.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the cooked tapioca.
Pineapple
Adds fruit flavour and gentle acidity.

The step that matters

Boil until the mixture is clear. Tapioca starch must be fully heated to swell and gelatinize. Boiling until the mixture turns clear shows the starch is cooked; if it stays cloudy, it can taste chalky and have a firm, grainy texture.

“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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