Why it works: Coffee and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,239 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Coffee for One Hundred
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the coffee
Mix the ground coffee with the eggs.
Make small muslin sacks and place 1 pint of the coffee mixture in each, leaving room for it to swell.
Brew
In a large coffee boiler, add 5 gallons of boiling water.
Put in some of the sacks and boil for 1 hour.
5 to 10 minutes before serving, add 1 or 2 more sacks.
Continue adding sacks at regular intervals, removing those that were added first to keep the coffee fresh.
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.
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Coffee + eggtop 29% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together3,239 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Ground coffee
- Provides the coffee flavor and aroma that infuse into the boiling water.
- Eggs
- Bind the grounds together and help clarify the brew as they set during boiling.
The step that matters
Adding sacks at regular intervals. Adding and removing sacks on a schedule keeps the brew at a steady strength. Leaving sacks in too long can over-extract bitter flavors from the grounds.
“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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