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 ↓
Orang Ice
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the base
Squeeze the juice from 12 oranges.
Peel 6 oranges very thinly and boil the peels in 1 pint of water for about 10 minutes.
Let the mixture cool, then strain it into a bowl.
Strain the orange juice into the same bowl and mix with the boiled water.
Sweeten and freeze
Sweeten the mixture to taste, ensuring it is rich with sugar.
Add a glass of ratafia and freeze the mixture like other ices.
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.
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Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- Provide the juice and peel that give the ice its main flavour and aroma.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the ice and lowers its freezing point so it stays softer when frozen.
- Ratafia
- Adds alcohol, which keeps the ice from freezing too hard and adds aroma.
The step that matters
Sweeten the mixture to taste. Sugar lowers the freezing point of the liquid. Too little sugar makes the ice freeze hard and icy, so the mixture should be sweet enough before freezing.
“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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