Skip to main content
Drink

White Wine Whey

A whey product made by curdling milk with white wine and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
White Wine Whey

Why it works: Milk and white wine work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 929 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity. The science ↓

White Wine Whey

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan until it boils.

  2. Add the white wine and dissolved sugar immediately.

  3. Boil for a few minutes until a light curd forms.

  4. Pour the mixture through a fine sieve to separate the whey from the curd.

  5. Serve the whey hot and discard the curd.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + white winetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together929 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. White wine + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,586 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Milk
Its proteins clump into curds once the mixture is acidified, providing the solids that separate from the whey.
White wine
Its acidity makes the milk proteins coagulate, forming the curd.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the whey.

The step that matters

Add the white wine immediately after the milk boils. The wine's acid is what curdles the milk proteins. Adding it promptly while the milk is hot lets the curd form quickly, so the whey separates cleanly when strained.

“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.

You might also like

Wine WheyWine Whey111 recipesRaisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesEgg WineEgg Wine58 recipesElderberry WineElderberry Wine51 recipes