Skip to main content

Rhubarb Cream Cheese Hand Pies

, I retold the sad tale of the late rhubarb meringue tart that met its end when it slid off the plate and managed to coat nearly every part of the open fridge I’d intended to put it into with smears of curd, puffs of meringue and crust of crumbs. Rhubarb, although not to blame, and I took a break after that, and it might had continued longer had I not been haunted by an Instagram commenter () who urged me to try my hand at a rhubarb cream cheese danish. I imagined the tart pink rhubarb against a lemony slick of cheesecake, enveloped in a puff of orange-scented pastry and I could not bear it.

By smittenkitchen · From Open Recipes · 16 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rhubarb and cream cheese work together. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and 22 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-methylbutyraldehyde, which smells malty, chocolate. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg, milk, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Step-by-step directions aren't available for this recipe. See the full recipe at the source →

By smittenkitchen. Recipe from Open Recipes.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Rhubarb + cream cheesetop 21% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together22 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  2. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together10,632 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Butter + cream cheesetop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Orange + rhubarbtop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together299 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Flour + buttermilktop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together3,667 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

Flavor stand-ins for the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, butter, buttermilk, rhubarb, cream cheese, lemon):

  1. Vanillabetter flavor fit
  2. Blueberryabout as good a flavor fit
  3. Orangethe original
  4. Strawberryabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, buttermilk, rhubarb, cream cheese, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).