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Drink

Dandelion Beer

A fermented beverage made from boiled dandelions, water, sugar or molasses, yeast, and wintergreen.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Dandelion and sugar work together. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 80 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Dandelion Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the dandelions in water.

  2. Strain the mixture and add sugar or molasses.

Ferment

  1. When warm, stir in the yeast.

  2. Let it stand overnight.

Bottle

  1. Carefully draw off the liquid and add wintergreen.

  2. Bottle the mixture.

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. Dandelion + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together80 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh dandelions
Provide the main flavor and body of the beer.
Sugar or molasses
Feed the yeast and add sweetness.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Wintergreen
Adds a minty, aromatic flavor.

The step that matters

Stir in the yeast when warm. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture should be warm, not hot, before adding it. Yeast that is too cool works slowly, while yeast that is too hot dies and fermentation fails.

“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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