Why it works: Milk and white wine work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 929 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity. The science ↓
Wine Whey
Ingredients
Directions
Curdle the milk
Boil the milk in a saucepan.
Add the white wine and heat until it just boils again.
Settle and strain
Remove from heat and let the curd settle.
Strain the mixture and sweeten to taste.
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.
Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it
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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Milk + white winetop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together929 recipes
Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).
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Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together77,875 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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White wine + sugartop 30% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together2,586 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
- Milk
- Its proteins clump into curds when acid is added, forming the body of the whey.
- White wine
- Its acidity makes the milk proteins coagulate, separating curds from the clear whey.
- Sugar
- Adds sweetness to the strained whey, balancing the wine's tartness.
The step that matters
Adding the wine and heating until it just boils again. The wine's acid is what curdles the milk. Overheating or boiling too long can toughen the curds and make them harder to separate cleanly from the liquid.
“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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