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Sour Milk Doughnuts

A doughnut made with sour milk, eggs, sugar, butter, flour, baking soda, salt, nutmeg, and fried in oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Sour Milk Doughnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, beat the eggs and mix in the sugar and butter until smooth.

  2. Stir in the sour cream or milk, baking soda, salt, and nutmeg.

  3. Gradually add flour until a stiff dough forms.

  4. Cover the dough and refrigerate overnight.

Shape and fry

  1. The next morning, let the dough sit in a warm place for 2 hours.

  2. Roll out the dough and cut with a doughnut cutter.

  3. Fry the doughnuts in deep hot oil 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.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cream + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Butter and flour 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

Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure to the crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the doughnuts and helps them brown when fried.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavour in the dough.
Sour cream or milk
Supplies moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic dairy to produce gas that helps the doughnuts rise.
Flour
Forms the gluten and starch structure that holds the stiff dough together.

The step that matters

Gradually add flour until a stiff dough forms. Adding flour slowly lets you stop at the right stiffness. Too much flour makes the doughnuts dense and tough, while too little leaves a dough too soft to roll and cut cleanly.

“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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