Why it works: Coffee and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,239 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Coffee for 100
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Grind the coffee and mix it with the eggs.
Make small muslin sacks and place 1 pint of the coffee mixture in each, leaving room for expansion.
Brew
In a coffee urn with a faucet at the bottom, add 5 gallons of boiling water.
Put in some of the sacks and boil for 2 hours.
5-10 minutes before serving, raise the lid and add 1-2 more sacks, replacing the first sacks with fresh ones and topping up with boiling water.
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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Coffee + eggtop 29% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together3,239 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
- Roasted coffee
- Supplies the main flavor, aroma and body of the brew.
- Eggs
- Egg proteins bind the fine grounds and help clarify the brew.
- Boiling water
- Acts as the solvent that extracts flavor from the coffee grounds.
The step that matters
Leave room in each sack. Ground coffee swells as it absorbs water. A sack packed full has no room to expand, so it can burst or release grounds into the brew and make it muddy.
“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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