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Dessert

Apple Strudel

A pastry filled with sliced apples, cinnamon, sugar, raisins, and butter, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Apple Strudel

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Mix flour with water and knead into a loose, flabby dough.

  2. Place the dough in the center of a floured surface and pull and spread it thin like tissue paper until it covers the table.

Fill and roll

  1. Spread the sliced apples evenly over the dough, then sprinkle with cinnamon, sugar, raisins, and melted butter.

  2. Take one end of the dough and roll it up like a jelly roll until it meets the other end.

  3. Cut the rolled dough into small pieces and place them in a baking dish.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden brown.

  2. Serve plain or with cream.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  4. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Flour
Forms the dough's structure, which stretches thin and holds the filling together.
Butter or fat
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the pastry turn golden brown in the oven.
Apples
Provide the main filling, bringing moisture and tartness that contrast with the sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the exposed pastry brown.

The step that matters

Pulling the dough thin. Stretching the dough until it is thin enough to see through gives a flaky, tender layered pastry. If it is left thick, the strudel becomes dense and doughy rather than light.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, cinnamon, sugar, raisin):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applethe original
  4. Coconutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, cinnamon, sugar, raisin. 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.

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