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Drink

Essence of Caraway

An infusion of caraway seeds steeped in wine spirits to produce a tincture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Spirit and wine work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 701 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Essence of Caraway

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tincture

  1. Place caraway seeds in a bottle with spirits of wine.

  2. Cork the bottle and keep it in a warm place for about ten days.

Filter and store

  1. Filter the essence through a fine cloth.

  2. Transfer to smaller bottles and stopper them well until needed.

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. Spirit + winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together701 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  2. Caraway + spirittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together36 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Caraway + winetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together126 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Caraway seeds
Release their aromatic oils into the spirit, giving the tincture its flavour.
Spirits of wine
Acts as the solvent that extracts and carries the seed oils and flavour.

The step that matters

Corking the bottle during the warm steep. The bottle must be sealed so alcohol does not evaporate and the aromatic compounds stay in the spirit while they extract over about ten days.

Swap the caraway

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spirit, wine):

  1. Rosemaryfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Mintfits better
  4. Carawaythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spirit, wine. 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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