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Dessert

Water Muffins

A yeast-based batter made with water, milk, and flour, baked on a griddle into muffins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Water Muffins

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Stir the yeast in the warm water.

  2. Add the salt and gradually mix in enough flour to create a thick batter.

  3. Cover the batter and let it rise until light.

Bake

  1. Heat a griddle and grease it.

  2. Place rings on the griddle and fill each with a spoonful of batter.

  3. Bake over high heat.

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour 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

Yeast
Ferments the batter, producing gas that makes it rise and turn light.
Flour
Forms the thick batter structure that holds the risen bubbles as the muffins set.

The step that matters

Letting the batter rise until light. Yeast needs time to ferment and trap gas in the batter. If the batter is under-risen, the muffins will be dense; the rise is what gives them their lightness.

“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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