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Drink

Koumiss

Fermented mare's or other animal milk beverage made with rennet and sour rye flour paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and rye work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 918 recipes. Both carry ethyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Koumiss

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Add a little rennet and a bit of sour rye flour paste or old koumiss to the milk.

  2. Hang the mixture up.

  3. Agitate it briskly for some time.

  4. Let it rest.

  5. Agitate it again until it thickens.

Store and refresh

  1. Store in a quart or two-quart bottle, leaving some koumiss in the vessel.

  2. Add new milk to the remaining koumiss.

  3. Agitate as before.

Sweeten and serve

  1. Sweeten with double-refined sugar and warm water to mimic the taste of mare's or ass's milk.

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. Milk + ryetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together918 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  2. Milk + lambtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together414 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  4. Rye + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together535 recipes

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

  5. Lamb + ryetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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
Forms the body of the drink, and its proteins thicken as the culture works.
Rennet
Curdles the milk proteins, helping the mixture thicken.
Sour rye flour paste or old koumiss
Supplies the live cultures that ferment the milk and sour its flavor.
Double-refined sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the sourness of the fermented milk.

The step that matters

Agitate it again until it thickens. Vigorous agitation breaks up curds and incorporates air while fermentation proceeds, so the texture becomes smooth rather than lumpy. Stopping too early leaves the drink thin and uneven.

“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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