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Drink

Rice Coffee

A beverage made by steeping ground brown rice in boiling water and sweetening with sugar and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rice Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Brown the rice as you would coffee beans.

  2. Grind or mash the browned rice in a mortar.

Brew and serve

  1. Pour 1 quart of boiling water over ½ cup of the ground rice.

  2. Let it stand for 10 to 15 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture.

  4. Sweeten with loaf sugar and season with boiled milk.

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. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 recipes

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

Sugar and milk 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

Brown rice
Browning develops the roasted, coffee-like flavour that the drink is built on.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the roasted, slightly bitter flavour.
Boiled milk
Adds richness and softens the roasted flavour.

The step that matters

Browning the rice. The roasted flavour comes from browning, which triggers Maillard reactions and caramelisation in the starches and sugars of the grain. Rice that is pale or only lightly toasted will taste flat and grainy, while rice browned evenly to a deep golden-brown gives the drink its coffee-like aroma.

“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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