Skip to main content
Drink

Dandelion Wine

A fermented beverage made from dandelion flowers, sugar, lemon juice, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Dandelion and lemon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 57 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Dandelion Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the infusion

  1. Pour 2 quarts of boiling water over 1 quart of dandelion flowers.

  2. Let the mixture stand overnight.

  3. Strain the mixture the next day.

Make the wine

  1. Add 3 pounds of sugar and the juice of 2 lemons to 1 gallon of the strained juice.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Transfer it to a barrel or keg and add bread yeast.

  4. Keep enough juice to refill as needed.

  5. Once fermentation is complete, tightly cork the container.

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. Dandelion + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together57 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + breadtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

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

  4. Dandelion + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together80 recipes

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

  5. Dandelion + breadtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Dandelion flowers
Provide the flavour and aroma that define the wine.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and provides sweetness and alcohol through fermentation.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the flavour and helps balance the sweetness.
Bread yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

The step that matters

Transfer it to a barrel or keg and add bread yeast. Yeast must be added to a cooled, sugared liquid; boiling or very hot liquid kills yeast and stops fermentation. Keeping the container topped up limits oxygen exposure that lets spoilage organisms grow.

“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

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesLemon EssenceLemon Essence8 recipes