Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓
Orange Wine
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the rinds
Pare the rinds from the oranges.
Adjust the amount for bitterness.
Pour boiling water over the rinds.
Let the mixture stand for 12 hours.
Strain off the water to extract essential oils.
Make the juice and pulp
Remove the peel from the remaining oranges.
Squeeze the juice into a cask.
Add 45 pounds of sugar to the cask.
Soak the pulp in water for 24 hours.
Strain the pulp.
Add the strained pulp to the cask.
Repeat soaking until the cask is full.
Stir well until the sugar dissolves.
Ferment and store
Set aside to ferment.
When fermentation subsides, close the bung-hole.
Store as with gooseberry wine.
Keep the wine in the cask for a year before bottling.
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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Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together19,212 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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
- Seville oranges
- Provide the juice, pulp and peel that supply the wine's flavour and fermentable sugars.
- White sugar
- Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.
The step that matters
Stir well until the sugar dissolves. Undissolved sugar settles at the bottom and ferments unevenly, so the wine can ferment unevenly or stall. Thorough stirring gives the yeast even access to sugar.
“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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