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Dandelion Wine

A fermented beverage made from dandelion blossoms, sugar, yeast, orange and lemon juice, steeped and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

Dandelion Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Steep the blossoms

  1. Pour 4 gallons of boiling water over 1 bushel of dandelion blossoms.

  2. Let it stand until the next day.

Strain and sweeten

  1. Press out the juice and strain it.

  2. Add 3 pounds of granulated sugar for each gallon of juice.

Add yeast and citrus

  1. Stir in the compressed yeast and the juice of 6 oranges and 3 lemons.

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. Dandelion + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together57 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Dandelion + orangetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together31 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Sugar + orangetop 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

Dandelion blossoms
Provide the floral flavour and the base liquid for the wine.
Granulated sugar
Feeds the yeast and sets the sweetness and alcohol level of the wine.
Compressed yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Oranges
Add acidity and citrus aroma that balance the sweetness.
Lemons
Add sharp acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sugar.

The step that matters

Add the sugar per gallon of juice. Yeast converts sugar into alcohol, so the sugar amount sets how strong and sweet the wine becomes. Measure the sugar against the actual volume of strained juice, not the water used, so fermentation is balanced.

“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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