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Sauted Potato Balls

Sautéed potato balls are boiled, then pan-fried with butter and paprika.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,456 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Sauted Potato Balls

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Parboil the potato balls in boiling salted water for 10 minutes.

  2. Drain the potato balls and place them in an omelet pan with a small piece of butter.

  3. Sprinkle the potato balls sparingly with paprika.

  4. Cover the pan and cook on the back of the range until delicately browned, shaking the pan frequently.

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. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Fried potato + buttertop 40% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together0 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Potato + fried potatotop 50% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together0 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Potato balls
Form the main body of the dish, cooking through and taking on a browned surface.
Butter
Adds fat for gentle browning and a richer flavour in the pan.

The step that matters

Cover the pan and cook on the back of the range until delicately browned. Covering traps steam to heat the potatoes through, while frequent shaking keeps them from sticking and browning unevenly. Too much heat or too little shaking can scorch one side before the rest colours.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fried potato, butter):

  1. Onionfits better
  2. Potatothe original
  3. Leekfits less well
  4. Chivefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against fried potato, butter. 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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