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Drink

Dandelion Wine

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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

Make the infusion

  1. Place dandelion flowers in a large container and pour boiling water over them.

  2. Let the mixture stand overnight.

  3. Strain the mixture in the morning.

Boil and ferment

  1. Add white sugar and juice from the lemons, then boil for 1 hour.

  2. Strain again into a stone jar and let it sit for 2 to 3 weeks.

  3. Add whiskey and strain into bottles.

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

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

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

White sugar
Provides the sweetness and the sugar that yeast converts to alcohol during fermentation.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Whiskey
Adds alcohol that strengthens the wine and helps preserve it.
Dandelion flowers
Provide the main floral flavour and colour of the wine.

The step that matters

Strain again into a stone jar and let it sit for 2 to 3 weeks. The long rest lets fermentation finish and the flavours settle. Moving the wine too early, or sealing it before fermentation has slowed, can cause it to build pressure or turn cloudy.

“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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