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Dessert

Rye Rolls

A stiff rye dough made with milk, eggs, lard, and sugar, rolled and baked into round cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Rye and wheat match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 404 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Rye Rolls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine milk, beaten eggs, salt, lard, and sugar.

  2. Stir in enough rye flour to form a very stiff batter.

Shape the rolls

  1. Dust your hands with wheat flour and take a large spoonful of dough.

  2. Roll it out on a board like twisted doughnuts.

  3. Twist the rolled dough into a round cake shape and place on flat tins.

Bake

  1. Bake 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. Rye + wheattop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Milk + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Rye + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,320 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + wheattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + ryetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together918 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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 as they set in the oven.
Rye flour
Forms the main structure of the rolls, though its low gluten makes the dough stiff and dense.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and adds moisture and softness to the crumb.
Lard
Adds fat, which tenderises the crumb and carries flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Stirring in the rye flour to a very stiff batter. Rye flour has little gluten, so the dough must be kept very stiff to hold its shape. Too much liquid makes the rolls spread and turn out flat and gummy.

“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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