Why it works: Green tea and brandy work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50 recipes. Both carry ethyl benzoate, which smells sweet. The science ↓
Tea Liqueur
Ingredients
Directions
Infuse the tea
Pour 1 ½ cups of boiling water over 4 ounces of green tea and let it boil briefly.
Remove from heat and let it steep until lukewarm.
Pour the strong infusion into a tightly closed jar with 2 gallons of brandy.
Let it steep for 8 days.
If the brandy does not have a strong tea odor, infuse 2 more ounces of tea in ½ cup of water and add it to the brandy for another 8 days.
Sweeten and finish
After steeping, boil the mixture down by half in a water bath.
Dissolve 5 pounds of refined sugar in 4 quarts of the tea infusion or water.
Add the sugar solution to the brandy and filter it.
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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Green tea + brandytop 17% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together50 recipes
Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (sweet).
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Brandy + sugartop 19% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together11,939 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
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Green tea + sugartop 30% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together159 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Brandy and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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
- Green tea
- Supplies the main tea flavour and aroma that the brandy takes up during steeping.
- Brandy
- Acts as the alcoholic base that extracts and carries the tea flavour and aroma.
- Refined sugar
- Adds sweetness and rounds out the bitterness of the tea and alcohol.
The step that matters
Boiling the mixture down by half. Alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, so boiling the brandy mixture reduces it while driving off some alcohol and concentrating the flavour. A gentle water bath keeps the heat steady and controlled, which helps the liquid reduce evenly without scorching.
“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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