Skip to main content
Baking

Crumpets

A simple batter of flour, yeast, and milk or water is baked on a heated iron plate to make crumpets.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and milk 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 ↓

Crumpets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Mix flour and yeast in a bowl.

  2. Add enough milk or water to form a fluid paste.

  3. Let the mixture rise until doubled in size.

Cook

  1. Pour a portion of the fluid onto a heated iron plate.

  2. Bake quickly on both sides like a pancake.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Flour
Provides the starch and structure that hold the batter together as it cooks.
Yeast
Ferments the batter so gas bubbles form and the crumpet rises and becomes airy.
Milk or water
Hydrates the flour to form a fluid paste that can be poured and set in the pan.

The step that matters

Let the mixture rise until doubled in size. Yeast needs time to produce gas that expands the batter. If the batter is under-risen, the crumpets will be dense and will not develop their characteristic holes.

“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 crumpets recipes

English 15Cornmeal 5Plain 4Tea 4Scotch 3 See all 49 →

You might also like

Delicate CakeDelicate Cake246 recipesBoiled FrostingBoiled Frosting69 recipesCitron CakeCitron Cake68 recipesScotch CakeScotch Cake63 recipes