Skip to main content
Drink

Orange Water-ice

A chilled beverage made by freezing orange juice, water, sugar, and citrus rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Water-ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Juice the oranges and combine with water and sugar in a bowl.

  2. Grate the rind of one orange and one lemon, then add to the mixture.

  3. Stir well until the sugar dissolves.

Freeze

  1. Pour the mixture into an ice cream maker or a shallow dish.

  2. Freeze until solid, stirring occasionally to break up ice crystals.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Sugar
Dissolves into the water to add sweetness and soften the texture of the frozen ice.
Oranges
Provide the juice that gives the ice its main flavour and acidity.
Orange rind
Adds aromatic citrus oils that deepen the orange flavour.

The step that matters

Stirring while freezing. Water freezes into large, coarse ice crystals if left still. Stirring during freezing breaks up these crystals, producing a smoother, finer-grained texture.

“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.

You might also like

Orange SyrupOrange Syrup47 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipes