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Green Mango Burta

A chilled green mango drink made with mango pulp, sugar, salt, ginger, mint, and chili.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and mint work together. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 647 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Green Mango Burta

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mango

  1. Peel the mangoes and remove the seeds.

  2. Soak the mangoes in cold water, then pound them into a smooth pulp using a mortar and pestle. Ensure the mortar is clean to avoid unwanted flavors.

Season the drink

  1. Mix the sugar with the mango pulp; if too acidic, add more sugar.

  2. Combine the pulp with salt and the ground ingredients, adjusting salt or sugar to taste.

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. Ginger + minttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Mango + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together280 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Mango + minttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together148 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Mango + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together561 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Green mangoes
Provide the tart base and bulk of the drink's flavor and pulp.
Sugar
Balances the sourness of the unripe mango and rounds out the flavor.
Salt
Sharpens and enhances the other flavors in the drink.

The step that matters

Adjusting sugar and salt to taste. Unripe mangoes vary in acidity, and sugar and salt change how sour, sweet and savory the drink tastes. Tasting and adjusting after combining keeps the balance right, since sweetness and salt perceived on the tongue depend on the overall mix.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mango, sugar, ginger):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mango, sugar, ginger. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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