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Snow Balls

Rice balls filled with apricots, steamed and served with apricot sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Snow Balls

Why it works: Rice and apricot work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 353 recipes. Both carry gamma-undecalactone, which smells peach, sweet. The science ↓

Snow Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cook rice until tender.

  2. Wring out a small pudding cloth and lay it over a small bowl.

  3. Spread rice to a thickness of ⅓ inch over the cloth.

Shape and steam

  1. Place an apricot in the center and fill each half with rice.

  2. Tie the cloth tightly and steam for 10 minutes.

  3. Carefully remove the cloth and turn the balls out onto a platter.

Serve

  1. Serve with apricot sauce.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + apricottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together353 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).

  2. Rice + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,396 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Apricot + saucetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together152 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cooked rice
Forms the soft, starchy body that holds the shape of each snowball.
Apricots
Provide a sweet, tangy fruit centre that contrasts with the bland rice.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth tightly before steaming. A loose cloth lets rice spread and fall apart during steaming, so the tight wrap is what keeps each ball round and whole.

Swap the apricot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, sauce):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, sauce. 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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