Skip to main content
Drink

Koumiss

A fermented milk drink made by boiling milk, adding sugar and yeast, then fermenting in bottles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Koumiss

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the milk

  1. Boil the fresh milk and let it cool slightly.

  2. Pour the milk into quart bottles, leaving room to shake.

Ferment

  1. Add the crushed lump sugar and Vienna yeast to the bottles.

  2. Cork the bottles with new corks and tie them down.

  3. Keep the bottles cool and lay them horizontally.

  4. Shake the bottles twice daily.

  5. It will be ready to drink on the sixth day, or earlier in hot weather.

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

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

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

Fresh milk
Provides the liquid base and proteins and sugars that the yeast ferments.
Crushed lump sugar
Feeds the yeast, producing carbonation and a lightly sweet, tangy flavour.
Vienna yeast
Ferments the milk sugars, creating alcohol, carbon dioxide and the drink's characteristic sharpness.

The step that matters

Shake the bottles twice daily. Shaking mixes the yeast and sugar through the milk and releases built-up carbon dioxide into the liquid. Without it, fermentation can be uneven and pressure may build unevenly in the sealed bottles.

“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.

You might also like

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes