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Dessert

Strawberry Granite

A chilled strawberry dessert made by freezing a syrup of sugar, water, orange juice, and strawberry juice, then stirring in berries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and strawberry work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 726 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Strawberry Granite

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar and water together for 5 minutes.

  2. Carefully drop the strawberries into the syrup.

  3. Lift the strawberries out of the syrup with a skimmer.

  4. Place the strawberries on a platter to cool.

Combine and strain

  1. Add the cooled strawberries and orange juice to the syrup.

  2. Strain the mixture.

Freeze and serve

  1. Freeze the strained mixture like orange water ice.

  2. Once frozen, stir in the strawberries.

  3. Serve in glasses.

  4. Optionally, top with uncooked berries.

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. Orange + strawberrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together726 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + strawberrytop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,060 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked 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

Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and keeps the frozen ice soft rather than rock-hard.
Strawberries
Provide the main fruit flavor, colour and soft pieces of texture.
Orange juice
Adds brightness and acidity that balances the sweetness.
Strawberry juice
Adds liquid and concentrated strawberry flavor to the base.

The step that matters

Stir in the strawberries once frozen. Adding the berries after the mixture has frozen keeps their texture and fresh flavor intact. Heating or long contact with the sugary liquid would soften them and dilute their taste.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, strawberry):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Bananafits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, strawberry. 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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