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Drink

Dandelion Wine

A fermented beverage made from dandelion flowers, water, lemons, sugar, 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

Prepare the liquid

  1. Cover dandelion flowers with water and boil.

  2. Strain the mixture and let it cool to lukewarm.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Add the lemons, sugar, and yeast cake.

  2. Let it stand for about 10 days or until fermentation is complete.

  3. Strain again, bottle, and seal.

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. Lemon + sugartop 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).

Lemon and sugar 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

White sugar
Feeds the yeast and provides the sweetness and alcohol that form during fermentation.
Yeast cake
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, driving the wine's fermentation.
Lemons
Add acidity and bright citrus flavor that balances the sugar.
Dandelion flowers
Provide the floral aroma and flavor that define the wine.

The step that matters

Let fermentation finish before bottling. Yeast keeps producing carbon dioxide while it ferments. Bottling and sealing before fermentation is complete can trap enough gas to build pressure and burst bottles, so wait until it has stopped.

“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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