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Drink

Ginger Pop

A fermented ginger drink made with ginger, lemon, sugar, yeast, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Ginger Pop

Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Ginger Pop

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ginger

  1. Bruise the ginger root.

  2. Boil it in a little water to extract its flavor.

Make the mixture

  1. Cut and squeeze the lemons.

  2. Add them to the water with the skins.

  3. Add the yeast when the mixture is lukewarm.

  4. Let the mixture stand in a jar at room temperature for 24 hours.

Bottle and wait

  1. After 24 hours, bottle the mixture.

  2. It will start to pop within another 24 hours.

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.

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.

  1. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Ginger + creamtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Yeast
Ferments the sugar, producing carbonation that makes the drink fizz and pop.
White sugar
Provides the fuel for fermentation and sweetness to the finished drink.
White ginger root
Supplies the main flavor, extracted by boiling in water.
Lemons
Add acidity and bright citrus flavor.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity that helps balance the sweetness and stabilises the flavor.

The step that matters

Add the yeast when the mixture is lukewarm. Yeast is killed by hot liquid, so adding it while the mixture is still hot can stop fermentation. Waiting until it is lukewarm keeps the yeast alive so it can ferment the sugar and carbonate the drink.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ginger, sugar, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Orangefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, sugar, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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