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Sauce

Coffee Sauce

A sauce made from roasted coffee berries, arrowroot or cornflour, brandy, sugar, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Coffee and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,344 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Coffee Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the coffee

  1. Roast the coffee berries in a pan over high heat until well browned.

  2. Pound the roasted coffee berries in a mortar.

Make the sauce

  1. Pour the boiling water over the prepared coffee and let it stand for a few minutes.

  2. Strain the mixture into a saucepan.

  3. Blend the cornflour smoothly with the brandy and stir it into the coffee.

  4. Sweeten to taste and simmer gently for 5 minutes before serving.

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. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Arrowroot + brandytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together141 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Coffee + arrowroottop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  4. Brandy + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Arrowroot + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

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

Brandy and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Coffee berries
Provide the main coffee flavour, which deepens through roasting before infusion.
Arrowroot or cornflour
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it body.
Brandy
Adds aroma and a warming, aromatic flavour to the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the bitterness of the coffee.

The step that matters

Blend the cornflour smoothly with the brandy before stirring it in. Starch added directly to hot liquid clumps, because the outer layer of each granule gels before the inside can hydrate. Mixing it into a cold liquid first disperses the granules so the sauce thickens evenly.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Sweet potatofits about as well
  2. Arrowrootthe original
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Beetrootfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against coffee, brandy, sugar. 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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