Name: Orange Wine
Ingredients: 90 oranges; 27 pounds sugar; 1½ gallons water

Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange Wine

Ingredients

90 oranges
27 pounds sugar
1½ gallons water

Directions

Prepare

Strain the juice of 90 oranges and add it to 27 pounds of sugar in a clean cask.
Put the pulp (without seeds) into 1½ gallons of water, cook all together, then strain it.

Ferment

Add more water and stir every day for 10 days.

Bottle and age

Bottle it and let it age for 3 months before using.

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.

Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together19,212 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Oranges: Juice and pulp supply the main flavour, acidity and aroma of the wine.
Sugar: Provides sweetness and feeds the yeast, which turns it into alcohol during fermentation.

“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.