Why it works: Milk and tea work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 738 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓
Milk Tea
1 breakfast cupIngredients
Directions
Pour boiling milk over dry tea in a Hobb's patent infuser.
Cover and let it steep for fifteen minutes, keeping it hot.
Alternatively, use an ordinary teapot and pour off the tea leaves after fifteen minutes.
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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Milk + teatop 11% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together738 recipes
Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Milk
- Provides richness and a creamy body that softens the tea's astringency.
- Dry tea
- Supplies the main flavour and aroma as it steeps in the hot liquid.
The step that matters
Keeping the milk hot while it steeps. Tea leaves release flavour and aroma best in hot liquid. If the milk cools during the fifteen-minute steep, extraction slows and the drink tastes weak and flat.
“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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