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Dessert

Doughnuts

A sweet fried dough made with potatoes, yeast, milk, lard, sugar, eggs, nutmeg, salt, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Doughnuts

Why it works: Potato and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,052 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Doughnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potato batter

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender.

  2. Mash the boiled potatoes finely.

  3. Add water, yeast cakes, and enough flour to create a batter.

  4. Heat the milk until lukewarm.

  5. Melt the lard in the heated milk.

  6. Stir in enough flour to make a very thick batter.

  7. Add the mashed potato mixture to the batter.

  8. Let the batter rise overnight.

Shape the dough

  1. In the morning, mix in sugar, beaten eggs, nutmeg, and salt.

  2. Knead in enough flour to roll out the dough.

  3. Let the dough rise again until spongy and light.

  4. Roll out the dough to ½ inch thick.

  5. Cut the rolled dough into shapes.

  6. Let the cut dough rise again until very light.

Fry

  1. Fry the doughnuts in 2 pounds of lard until golden brown.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Potatoes
Add moisture and starch that keep the dough soft and tender.
Yeast cakes
Produce gas during rising, making the dough light and spongy.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the dough hold its shape.
Lard
Adds fat for tenderness and gives the doughnuts their frying richness.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness and helps feed the yeast.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the doughnuts brown when fried.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise fully before frying. Yeast needs time to produce gas; under-proofed dough fries up dense and heavy. Rising in two stages builds the light, spongy texture, so each rise should reach the stated stage before shaping or frying.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Potatothe original

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

More doughnuts recipes

Raised 110Plain 25Potato 18German 17Isle of Wight 16Sour Milk 14 See all 168 →

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