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Dessert

Doughnuts or Crullers with Baking Powder

A sweet fried dough made with flour, baking powder, butter, eggs, sugar, milk, and flavored with lemon and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Doughnuts or Crullers with Baking Powder

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Sift the baking powder into the flour.

  2. Cream the butter, sugar, and eggs together.

  3. Mix in the flour and milk to form a slack dough.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll out the dough and cut with a ring or cruller cutter.

  2. Place the cut doughnuts in a box and cover to prevent drying.

  3. Fry the doughnuts immediately.

  4. Dust with sugar or ice them after frying.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the dough together.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the dough so the doughnuts rise and stay light.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and gives a richer texture.
Egg yolks
Add fat and emulsifiers that enrich the dough and help bind it.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the doughnuts brown in the hot fat.
Milk
Adds moisture that hydrates the flour and gives the dough its slack consistency.

The step that matters

Fry the doughnuts immediately. Once cut, the dough begins to lose gas and dry at the surface. Frying straight away keeps the baking powder's lift working and prevents the doughnuts from becoming dense or greasy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, egg, sugar, milk, lemon):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, egg, sugar, milk, lemon. 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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