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Drink

Cider Without Apples

A fermented beverage made from water, sugar, tartaric acid, yeast, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Cider Without Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Mix 1 gallon of cold water with 1 lb of sugar, ½ oz of tartaric acid, and 1 tablespoon of yeast, then shake well.

  2. Combine 5 gallons of hot water with 30 lbs of brown sugar and ½ lb of tartaric acid.

  3. Add 25 gallons of cold water and 3 pints of yeast mixed with ½ lb of flour and 1 quart of water. Form a paste.

Ferment

  1. Pour everything into a barrel.

  2. Let it work for 24 hours, allowing the yeast to run out at the bung.

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 + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Brown sugar
Provides the fermentable sugar that the yeast converts into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide that drives the fizzing and working of the liquid.
Tartaric acid
Adds sharp acidity that gives the drink its tang and helps keep the fermentation balanced.

The step that matters

Letting it work in the barrel. The fermentation produces carbon dioxide that must be able to escape through the bung; a sealed vessel can build pressure and burst. Allowing the yeast to run out at the bung lets gas vent during the first 24 hours.

“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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