Why it works: Grape and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,490 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓
Grape Juice
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the grapes
Wash, drain, and stem the grapes.
Mash the grapes in a deep kettle with a wooden potato masher.
Heat slowly, adding a little water, until the grapes lighten in color.
Strain the juice
Drain the mixture in a jelly bag made of three thicknesses of cheesecloth.
Wring out the cloths in hot water.
Place the hot pulp (two quarts at a time) into the bag and hang to drain.
Once no more juice drips, squeeze the pulp as dry as possible, keeping the cloudy portion separate.
Sweeten and bottle
For each quart of juice, add 1 cup of sugar and cook for twenty minutes.
Bottle the juice and seal the corks with wax.
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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Grape + sugartop 23% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together7,490 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Grapes
- Provide the juice, which is the base of the drink and carries its flavor.
- Sugar
- Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the grape juice.
The step that matters
Squeezing the pulp. Squeezing too hard pushes fine solids and cloudiness into the juice, while squeezing too little wastes juice. Keeping the cloudy portion separate keeps the final juice clearer.
“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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