Name: Baked Apple Ice Cream
Ingredients: 6 sweet apples; 1 quart ice cream; sugar to taste

Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Baked Apple Ice Cream

Ingredients

6 sweet apples
1 quart ice cream
sugar to taste

Directions

Make the apple puree

Bake the apples until soft.
Pass the baked apples through a sieve.
Sweeten the apple puree to taste.

Finish and freeze

Stir the apple mixture into the ice cream base.
Freeze the mixture until firm.

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.

Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together16,478 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Apple + creamtop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,089 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Sweet apples: Provide the main flavour and, once baked and puréed, the body of the ice cream.
Ice cream: Supplies the creamy base that the apple purée is folded into.
Sugar: Adds sweetness to balance the tartness of the apples.