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Drink

Koumiss

A fermented milk beverage made by adding yeast to fresh milk and sweetening with sugar or syrup.

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 ↓

Koumiss

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Dissolve the yeast in a small amount of warm milk.

  2. Add the dissolved yeast to the quart of fresh milk.

  3. Sweeten with sugar or syrup as desired.

Bottle and ferment

  1. Seal the mixture in clean bottles and store at a cool temperature.

  2. Turn the bottles gently two or three times to mix the curd with the liquid after two and a half days.

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

Fresh milk
Provides the liquid base and the proteins and sugars that the yeast ferments.
Yeast
Ferments the milk sugars, producing gas and a slightly alcoholic, fizzy character.
Sugar or syrup
Sweetens the drink and gives the yeast extra sugar to ferment.

The step that matters

Turning the bottles gently. Turning the bottles only two or three times, and gently, mixes the curd with the liquid without shaking up the sealed bottles, which could build pressure and burst them. Gentle handling keeps the texture even.

“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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