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White Wine Whey

A whey made by boiling milk with white wine and sugar, then straining to separate curd.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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White Wine Whey

Why it works: Milk and white wine work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 929 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity. The science ↓

White Wine Whey

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan until it boils.

  2. Add the white wine and a little sugar dissolved in it.

  3. Boil for a few minutes until a light curd forms.

  4. Pour the mixture through a fine sieve to separate the whey from the curd.

  5. Serve the whey hot and discard the curd.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + white winetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together929 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. White wine + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,586 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Milk
Provides the proteins that separate into curds and whey when acid is added.
White wine
Adds acidity that makes the milk proteins curdle, separating the whey.

The step that matters

Boil for a few minutes until a light curd forms. Boiling the milk and acid together causes the proteins to coagulate into curds. Stopping too early leaves the milk unset, so less whey separates cleanly through the sieve.

“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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