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Drink

Rice Coffee

A beverage made by grinding browned rice and steeping it in boiling water, then sweetened with sugar and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rice Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Brown the rice as you would coffee beans.

  2. Grind the browned rice in a mill or mortar.

Brew

  1. Pour 1 quart of boiling water over ½ cup of the rice powder.

  2. Let it stand for 10 to 15 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture.

Sweeten and serve

  1. Sweeten with loaf sugar and season with boiled milk.

  2. Serve and enjoy.

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. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 recipes

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

Sugar and milk 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

Brown rice
Browning develops roasted, toasty flavours that give the drink its coffee-like character.
Boiling water
Hot water extracts flavour and aroma from the ground rice powder.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the roasted, slightly bitter taste.
Boiled milk
Adds creaminess and softens the roasted bitterness.

The step that matters

Browning the rice. Browning drives Maillard reactions and caramelisation, which create the roasted flavour. Too little leaves the drink weak and grainy, while too much turns the rice bitter and burnt, and that bitterness carries into the brew.

“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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