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Drink

Chicory Coffee

A coffee substitute made by roasting chicory root, grinding it, and mixing with roasted coffee.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Chicory and coffee work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50 recipes. Both carry maltol, which smells caramel, sweet. The science ↓

Chicory Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicory

  1. Cut the full-grown chicory root into slices.

  2. Roast the slices in iron cylinders with a little lard until browned.

  3. Grind the roasted chicory to a powder.

Blend and brew

  1. Mix 1 part of the ground chicory with 10-12 parts of ground coffee.

  2. Brew the mixture as you would regular coffee.

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. Chicory + coffeetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50 recipes

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Roasted chicory
Adds a dark, roasted flavour and body that stretches the coffee.
Roasted coffee
Provides the main coffee aroma and flavour in the brew.
Lard
Helps the chicory slices brown evenly during roasting.

The step that matters

Roast the slices until browned. Roasting converts starches and sugars in the chicory into browned, caramelised flavour compounds. Underroasted chicory tastes raw and starchy, while overroasted chicory turns bitter and burnt.

“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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