Why it works: Lime and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,332 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓
Lime-flower Tea
Ingredients
Directions
Pour boiling water over lime-flowers in a teapot.
Let the infusion steep for 10 minutes.
Strain and serve hot, sweetening with sugar or honey if desired.
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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Lime + sugartop 29% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together3,332 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Lime-flowers
- Provide the main floral aroma and flavour that the tea is built on.
- Boiling water
- Extracts the aromatic compounds and flavour from the flowers into the liquid.
The step that matters
Steeping the lime-flowers for 10 minutes. Steeping too briefly leaves the tea weak and thin, while steeping much longer can draw out bitter compounds from the flowers. Keeping the time near the recorded 10 minutes balances aroma against bitterness.
“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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