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Home-made Koumiss

Fermented milk drink made by boiling fresh milk, adding sugar and yeast, and allowing it to ferment for several days.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and hazelnut work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 231 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyraldehyde, which smells malty, chocolate. The science ↓

Home-made Koumiss

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the fresh milk and let it cool until nearly cold.

  2. Pour the milk into a quart bottle, leaving room to shake.

  3. Add the crushed sugar and the piece of yeast.

  4. Cork the bottle with a new cork and tie it down.

Ferment

  1. Keep the bottle cool and lay it horizontally.

  2. Shake the bottle twice daily.

  3. It will be ready to drink on the sixth day, or earlier in hot weather and later in cold weather.

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. Milk + hazelnuttop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

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

  3. Sugar + hazelnuttop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together649 recipes

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

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

Fresh milk
Provides the liquid and sugars that the yeast ferments into a lightly alcoholic, sour drink.
Lump sugar
Feeds the yeast, producing carbonation and additional alcohol during fermentation.
Vienna yeast
Starts the fermentation that turns the milk sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

The step that matters

Shaking the bottle twice daily. Shaking mixes the yeast through the milk and releases built-up gas, keeping fermentation even. Skipping it can leave the drink uneven.

Swap the hazelnut

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

  1. Cocoafits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Hazelnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar. 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.

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