Name: Orange Wine
Ingredients: 90 bitter oranges; 6 gallons water; 28 pounds sugar; 2 gallons water (for steeping)

Why it works: Bitter orange and sugar work together. They rank in the top 41% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14 recipes. The science ↓

Orange Wine

Ingredients

90 bitter oranges
6 gallons water
28 pounds sugar
2 gallons water (for steeping)

Directions

Prepare the juice and sugar

Pare the oranges very thin and squeeze the juice into a ten-gallon cask.
Add 6 gallons of water and 28 pounds of sugar to the cask.

Steep the peel

Steep half the peel in 2 gallons of water for 12 hours.
Pour this water into the cask.
Steep the remaining peel in the rest of the water.
Fill the cask.

Ferment and bottle

Stir daily until the sugar dissolves.
Seal the cask when fermentation ceases.
After 2 months, rack and fine the wine.
Bottle it after 3 more months.
If desired, add a bottle of brandy after the first 2 months.

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.

Bitter orange + sugartop 41% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together14 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Bitter oranges: Provide the juice and peel that give the wine its flavour and aroma.
Sugar: Feeds the fermentation, which produces alcohol and carbon dioxide.

“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.