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Home Made Koumiss

Fermented milk beverage made by adding yeast to fresh milk and allowing it to sour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Home Made Koumiss

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fill a 1-quart glass can with fresh milk.

  2. Add 3 teaspoons of sugar and shake well.

  3. Add ½ cake of yeast and seal the can.

Ferment

  1. Place the can in a warm spot at about 70°F (21°C).

  2. Shake the can once every hour.

  3. If made in the morning, let it sit until night, then refrigerate or place in a cool area.

  4. The next morning, it will be ready to use.

Serve

  1. Open the can over a pan to catch any overflow.

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. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Milk
Provides the liquid base and the proteins and sugars that the yeast ferments.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast, supplying the sugar it ferments and adding sweetness.
Yeast
Ferments the milk's sugars, producing the gas and tang that give koumiss its character.

The step that matters

Open the can over a pan to catch any overflow.. Fermentation produces carbon dioxide gas that builds pressure in a sealed can. Releasing it slowly prevents the contents from spraying out when the lid is opened.

“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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