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Flour-ball

A flour ball boiled in water, then grated and mixed with milk to thicken soups or stews.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Flour-ball

Ingredients

Directions

Make the flour ball

  1. Tie the flour tightly in a strong pudding bag.

  2. Place the bag in a saucepan of water and boil for 2 hours.

  3. When cold, remove the cloth and cut away the soft outer covering of the dough.

  4. Grate the hard, baked interior to a powder.

Use the thickener

  1. To use, rub the required quantity of powder with 2 tablespoons of milk into a smooth paste.

  2. Add a second tablespoon of milk, rubbing until a creamy mixture is obtained.

  3. Stir this mixture into the total quantity of liquid for the meal.

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. Wheat + milktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Wheat flour
Its starch forms the thickening powder once the dough is boiled and dried into a hard ball.
Milk
Moistens the grated powder so it can be rubbed into a smooth paste before mixing into liquid.

The step that matters

Rubbing the powder into a smooth paste with milk. Adding the powder directly to hot liquid can form lumps, because starch granules clump before they disperse. Working it smooth with a little cold milk first lets the granules separate, so they thicken evenly when stirred into the liquid.

“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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