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Drink

Walnut Coffee

A beverage made by roasting walnuts and brewing them as coffee.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and pecans match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 634 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Walnut Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Roast the walnut kernels as you would for butternut coffee.

  2. Use the same quantity of roasted walnuts to make the coffee.

  3. You can also use pecans or hickory-nuts in the same way for a nice variation.

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. Walnut + pecanstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Walnut + butternuttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together15 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Walnut + nutstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together284 recipes

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

  4. Pecans + nutstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together121 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Coffee + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together105 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Walnut kernels
Provide the nutty, roasted flavour that becomes the coffee base once roasted.

Swap the pecans

The recipe marks pecans as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (walnut, butternut, coffee, nuts):

  1. Hazelnutfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Pecansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, butternut, coffee, nuts. 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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