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Drink

Orange Wine

A fermented beverage made from Seville orange juice, pulp, peels, sugar, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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

  1. Juice the oranges, yielding about 7 quarts and 1 pint of juice.

  2. Peel the oranges thinly, removing the white pith to avoid bitterness.

  3. Steep the pulp and peels in water for 3-4 days.

Ferment

  1. In a cask, add the sugar, orange juice, and steeped water.

  2. Let it stand open until fermentation begins, then close it when fermentation ceases.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the wine after 12 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.

  1. 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

Seville oranges
Provide the juice and aromatic peel that flavour the wine.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast so it produces alcohol during fermentation.
Yeast
Converts the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.

The step that matters

Peel the oranges thinly, removing the white pith. The white pith carries bitter compounds, so removing it keeps the wine from tasting bitter. Thin peeling takes only the flavourful outer zest.

“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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