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Drink

Root Beer

Root beer is a fermented beverage made from bark, roots, hops, yeast, and sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Burdock and dandelion share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Root Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the roots and barks thoroughly.

  2. Cover them with water in a large kettle.

  3. Boil slowly until their strength is extracted.

  4. Strain the mixture, then dilute and sweeten to taste.

Ferment and bottle

  1. When cool, add the yeast and let it stand for 24 hours.

  2. Bottle or cork tightly in large stone jugs.

  3. If available, add spruce twigs or wintergreen for improved flavor.

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. Burdock + dandeliontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together25 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Dandelion + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together80 recipes

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

  3. Burdock + sugartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28 recipes

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

  4. Hops + sugartop 43% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Burdock + hopstop 62% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together0 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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

What each ingredient does

Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing carbonation and the bubbly character of the drink.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and feeds the yeast during fermentation.
Sarsaparilla
Supplies the main root flavor and aromatic character of the drink.
Spikenard root
Adds aromatic, earthy flavor body to the brew.
Prickly ash bark
Contributes a sharp, spicy aromatic note to the drink.

The step that matters

Letting the cooled brew stand with yeast for 24 hours. Yeast must be added only after the liquid has cooled, since heat kills it. Fermentation then produces carbon dioxide, which is trapped when the drink is bottled in tightly sealed containers.

Swap the burdock

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

  1. Burdockthe original
  2. Mustardfits about as well
  3. Lettucefits less well
  4. Beetrootfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against dandelion, hops, sugar. 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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