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Drink

Dandelion Wine

A fermented beverage made from dandelion flowers, water, sugar, lemon, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Dandelion and lemon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 57 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Dandelion Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Steep and strain

  1. Soak dandelion flowers in water for 3 days and nights.

  2. Strain the mixture through a cloth.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Add sugar, sliced lemons, and yeast to the liquid.

  2. Let it stand for 4 days and nights, then strain again.

  3. Return to the jar until no more scum appears on top.

  4. Bottle or jug the wine.

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.

  1. Dandelion + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together57 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Dandelion + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together80 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Dandelion flowers
Provide the main floral flavour and colour of the wine.
Granulated sugar
Feeds the yeast and gives the finished wine its sweetness and body.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, turning the liquid into wine.
Lemons
Add acidity and fresh citrus aroma that balance the sweetness.

The step that matters

Bottle only after scum stops forming. Scum on the surface shows fermentation is still active. Bottling before it settles can trap carbon dioxide, so bottles may build pressure or burst and the wine may keep changing in flavour.

“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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