Name: From Apple Cider
Ingredients: 2 quarts yeast; soft water; apple cider

Why it works: Apple and cider are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,238 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

From Apple Cider

Ingredients

2 quarts yeast
soft water
apple cider

Directions

Prepare

Choose a room that does not freeze.
Place barrels or large casks on their ends, without heads, to hold the desired amount.

Ferment

Fill each cask one-third full with soft water and two-thirds with apple cider.
Add 2 quarts of yeast to each cask.
In a few weeks, you will have good vinegar.

Bottle and refill

Fill barrels for sale, leaving one-eighth in the open barrels, and refill with water and cider as before.

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.

Apple + cidertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,238 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Apple cider: Provides the sugar and alcohol that the yeast and bacteria convert into acetic acid.
Yeast: Starts the fermentation that turns the cider's sugars into alcohol.

“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.