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Drink

Barley Water II

Barley water is a simple beverage made by cooking barley flour with water and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and flour work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 582 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Barley Water II

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Mix barley flour and cold water in the upper part of a double boiler.

  2. Gradually add boiling water and salt.

Cook

  1. Cook over direct heat for 5 minutes.

  2. Then cook in the double boiler for 15 minutes.

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. Barley + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together582 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Barley flour
Its starch thickens the liquid as it heats, giving the water body.
Boiling water
Hydrates the starch and makes up most of the liquid that thickens.

The step that matters

Gradually add boiling water. Starch clumps when hot liquid hits it all at once. Mixing the flour into cold water first and adding the boiling water slowly lets the granules disperse evenly before they swell and thicken.

“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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