Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓
A Home-Made Recipe for Sour Milk
Ingredients
Directions
Start the culture
Use a sour milk pitcher and add any leftover milk, from a teaspoonful to a pint or more.
Keep the pitcher covered with a cloth and place it near the cook-stove.
Keep it going
When the milk thickens, move it to a cooler place.
When the last of the sour milk is used, add a little sweet milk.
Occasionally add flour scrapings from the breadboard and stir thoroughly.
Clean and restart
When washing the pitcher, leave some milk for seed.
After washing and scalding the pitcher, add the saved milk and more milk.
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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Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together78,219 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Sour milk
- Acts as the starter culture, and its acidity thickens the fresh milk added to it.
- Sweet milk
- Fresh milk that feeds the culture and replaces the sour milk as it is used.
The step that matters
When washing the pitcher, leave some milk for seed.. The leftover milk carries the live bacterial culture into the next batch. Washing the pitcher completely clean would remove the starter, so the sour milk could not thicken fresh milk.
“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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