Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓
Orange Wine
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the oranges
Pare the rinds from 12 to 24 Seville oranges.
Pour 2 quarts of boiling water over the rinds and let it stand for 12 hours.
Strain off the water to extract essential oils.
Remove the peel from the remaining oranges and squeeze the juice into a cask.
Ferment and age
Add 45 pounds of white sugar to the cask.
Soak the orange pulp in water for 24 hours, then strain and add to the cask.
Repeat soaking and adding until the cask is full.
Stir well until the sugar is dissolved, then set aside to ferment.
When fermentation subsides, close the bung-hole and let it age for a year before bottling.
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.
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Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together19,212 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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
- Seville oranges
- Supply the juice and pulp that provide the wine's fruit base and acidity.
- White sugar
- Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.
The step that matters
Stir until the sugar is dissolved before fermenting. Sugar that stays undissolved sits at the bottom of the cask, so fermentation starts unevenly and the sweetness and alcohol level vary through the batch.
“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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