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Drink

Rice Water

Rice water is a beverage made by boiling rice in water and sweetening with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Rice Water

Why it works: Rice and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,744 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rice Water

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash the rice in cold water.

  2. Boil the rice in a large pot of water.

  3. Add sugar to the boiled rice water.

  4. Serve warm in winter or cold in summer.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Starch released into the cooking water gives the drink its body and cloudiness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the plain, starchy flavour of the rice water.

“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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