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Drink

Tomato Beer

A fermented tomato beverage sweetened with brown sugar and flavored with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,592 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Tomato Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tomato beer

  1. Mash the ripe tomatoes and strain the juice through a coarse linen bag.

  2. For every gallon of juice, add 1 pound of brown sugar and let it stand for 9 days.

  3. After 9 days, pour off the liquid and bottle it tightly.

Serve

  1. To serve, fill a pitcher nearly full with sweetened water, add lemon juice to taste, and mix in some of the tomato beer.

  2. For half a gallon of sweetened water, add 1 tumblerful of the tomato beer.

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. Tomato + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Tomato + sugartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

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

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

Ripe tomatoes
Provide the juice that ferments and forms the base of the drink.
Brown sugar
Feeds the fermentation and adds sweetness and depth of flavor.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the finished drink.

The step that matters

Standing period for the juice with sugar. The mixture must stand for the full 9 days so the sugar can ferment into a drinkable liquid. Stopping early leaves it sweet and underdeveloped, and bottling before fermentation settles can leave it cloudy or too active.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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