Name: To Make Ginger Beer Powders
Ingredients: 1 teaspoon powdered loaf sugar; 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger; 1/4 teaspoon baking soda; 1/4 teaspoon tartaric acid

Why it works: Sugar and ginger are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

To Make Ginger Beer Powders

sufficient to make half a pint of ginger beer

Ingredients

1 teaspoon powdered loaf sugar
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon tartaric acid

Directions

Prepare the powders

Mix the powdered loaf sugar, ground ginger, and baking soda together.
Fold the mixture into a blue paper for storage.
In a separate white paper, fold the tartaric acid for distinction.

Yield

These powders are sufficient to make half a pint of ginger beer.

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.

Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together14,054 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Powdered loaf sugar: Provides sweetness and food for fermentation in the finished ginger beer.
Baking soda: Reacts with the tartaric acid to release carbon dioxide, giving the drink its fizz.
Tartaric acid: Supplies acidity that gives a tangy flavor and reacts with baking soda to produce bubbles.
Ground ginger: Adds the characteristic spicy, aromatic flavor of ginger beer.

“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.