Why it works: Tea and cream work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 463 recipes. Both carry 2-heptanol, which smells bitter, floral. The science ↓
Making Tea
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Boil water and scald the teapot with it.
Steep the tea
For green tea, steep the tea without boiling for a few minutes.
For black tea, pour boiling water over the tea and let it boil for 5 to 10 minutes.
To keep the tea hot, cover the teapot with a 'bonnet' made from fabric.
Serve
Serve each cup with hot water to dilute if desired.
For boiled milk, simmer fresh milk in a pan, stirring frequently until thick and creamy.
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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Tea + creamtop 22% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together463 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Loose tea
- Provides the main flavour and aroma of the infusion.
- Soft water
- Extracts flavour from the tea evenly without the mineral interference of hard water.
- Milk
- Adds richness and creaminess, softening the tea's astringency when boiled.
The step that matters
Steep green tea without boiling. Green tea leaves are delicate, and boiling water makes the infusion bitter and astringent. Keeping the water just below boiling extracts flavour gently.
“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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