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Refining Cider

A method of refining cider by adding skimmed milk and allowing the mixture to settle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Milk and cider work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 342 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Refining Cider

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the milk

  1. Let the milk stand overnight.

  2. Skim the milk.

Refine the cider

  1. Pour the skimmed milk into the cask of cider.

  2. Stir the mixture well.

  3. Allow it to settle.

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 + cidertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together342 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

New sweet milk
Its proteins bind to haze and tannins in the cider, carrying them down so the liquid clears.
Cider
The liquid being clarified; its tannins and suspended haze are what the milk removes.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture well. Stirring spreads the milk through the whole cask so its proteins can reach the haze and tannins throughout the cider. Settling only clears the liquid properly once the milk is evenly mixed in.

“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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