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Dessert

Soda Scones

Soda scones are quick baked pastries made with flour, salt, tartaric acid, baking soda, and buttermilk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and buttermilk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,721 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Soda Scones

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour, salt, tartaric acid, and baking soda.

  2. Add buttermilk gradually to form a soft paste.

  3. Sprinkle flour on a board and turn the paste out onto it.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll the dough to less than 1 inch thick and cut with a round cutter.

  2. Place the scones on a griddle and bake for five minutes.

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. Flour + buttermilktop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the dough once mixed with liquid.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid to produce gas that makes the scones rise.
Tartaric acid
Supplies acidity that reacts with the baking soda to leaven the dough.
Buttermilk
Adds moisture and acidity that hydrates the flour and helps the baking soda react.

The step that matters

Add buttermilk gradually to form a soft paste. Adding liquid slowly lets you stop once the dough is soft but workable. Too much liquid makes the dough sticky and dense, while too little leaves dry, crumbly scones. Work quickly after the leavening reacts so the gas is trapped before it escapes.

“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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