Name: Tomato Vinegar
Ingredients: 4 quarts rain water; 1 pint sorghum; 4 quarts ripe tomatoes

Why it works: Sorghum and tomato work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Tomato Vinegar

Ingredients

4 quarts rain water
1 pint sorghum
4 quarts ripe tomatoes

Directions

Combine 4 quarts of rain water and 1 pint of sorghum in a large container.
Add 4 quarts of ripe tomatoes to the mixture.
Stir well to combine all ingredients.

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.

Sorghum + tomatotop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4 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

Rain water: Forms the liquid base that the other ingredients dissolve and ferment in.
Sorghum: Supplies sugars that microbes convert into acids, giving the vinegar its sharpness.
Ripe tomatoes: Add juice, natural sugars and flavor for the fermentation to work on.

“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.