Why it works: Tea and cream work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 463 recipes. Both carry 2-heptanol, which smells bitter, floral. The science ↓
Tea Making
Ingredients
Directions
Place the desired amount of tea leaves in a tea ball or muslin bag.
Put the tea ball in a kettle or urn and pour boiling water over it.
Let it steep for no more than 3 minutes to avoid bitterness.
Remove the tea ball and serve the tea, adding cream if desired.
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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Tea + creamtop 22% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together463 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Tea leaves
- Release the flavour, aroma and tannins into the water as they steep.
The step that matters
Limit the steeping time to 3 minutes. Tannins and other compounds in tea leaves extract steadily over time, so steeping too long pulls out bitter, astringent flavours.
“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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