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Dessert

Raised Doughnuts

A yeast-leavened doughnut made with milk, eggs, sugar, butter, and flour, fried and sprinkled with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Raised Doughnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. Scald the milk.

  2. Add the butter and sugar.

  3. Let it cool.

  4. Add the yeast and enough flour to make a dough stiff enough to stir with a spoon.

  5. Let this stand overnight.

Make the dough

  1. Beat the eggs and add them to the mixture.

  2. Add more flour to make a stiff dough, but do not make it too stiff.

  3. Let the dough rise again.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll it out.

  2. Cut with a cutter that makes a hole in the middle.

  3. Let the doughnuts stand for about 1.5 hours.

  4. Fry them in boiling lard.

  5. Sprinkle sugar over the fried doughnuts.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Milk
Provides liquid and richness that makes the dough soft and tender.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the dough hold its shape and turn tender.
Yeast
Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes the doughnuts rise and become light.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure and chew.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and gentle browning when fried.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and gives a richer flavor.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise again. Yeast needs time to produce gas and stretch the gluten; a dough that is under-proofed stays dense and greasy when fried, while over-proofing can make it collapse.

“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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