Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓
Raspberry or Currant Wine
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the fruit
Clear the fruit from any mouldy or bad pieces.
Bruise the fruit and mix with water.
After 24 hours, strain the liquor.
Ferment
Add 1 pound of sugar for every quart of liquor.
Place the mixture in a large pan and remove any scum that rises after 3-4 days before transferring to a barrel.
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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Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together12,256 recipes
Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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
- Raspberries or currants
- Provide the flavour, aroma and natural sugars that the fermentation turns into wine.
- Sugar
- Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.
The step that matters
Removing the scum after 3-4 days. Scum is a surface layer of fruit pulp, foam and wild microbes. Skimming it before transferring to the barrel keeps off-flavours and spoilage out of the wine.
“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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