Skip to main content
Drink

Dandelion Wine

A fermented beverage made from sugar, oranges, dandelion flowers, water, yeast, and sugar candy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and dandelion work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 31 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Dandelion Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Put the sugar in a pan and add the juice of the oranges.

  2. Boil the dandelion flowers, water, and orange rind for 30 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture over the sugar and work in 2 to 3 tablespoons of yeast when lukewarm.

  4. Crush the sugar candy before adding it.

Ferment and store

  1. Transfer to a stone or wooden cask after 2 days and seal when fermentation is complete.

  2. This wine can be consumed in 2 to 3 months but is better if kept longer.

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. Orange + dandeliontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together31 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + dandeliontop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together80 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Sugar
Feeds the yeast and provides the sweetness and alcohol in the finished wine.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, producing the wine.
Dandelion flowers
Supply the flavour and colour of the wine.
Oranges
Add acidity and citrus aroma through their juice and rind.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast when lukewarm. Yeast is killed by hot liquid, so the mixture must be cooled to lukewarm before yeast is worked in. Too hot and fermentation will fail to start.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, dandelion):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Orangethe original
  4. Vanillafits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, dandelion. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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

Orange SyrupOrange Syrup47 recipesOrange Water IceOrange Water Ice28 recipesVegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipes