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Dessert

To Make Crullers

A fried dough snack made from milk, sugar, eggs, flour, butter, nutmeg, and baking powder, deep‑fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

To Make Crullers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Stir together the milk, sugar, and eggs in a bowl.

  2. Add some flour and the melted butter, then stir in the remaining flour to form a soft dough.

Shape and fry

  1. Cut the dough into small pieces, roll into strips, and twist them together.

  2. Fry the twisted dough in boiling lard, turning until browned nicely.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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 as they set when fried.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer flavour in the finished cruller.
Flour
Forms the structure of the soft dough that holds the twisted shape.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the fried surface brown.
Baking powder
Releases gas that helps the dough rise and become light in the fryer.

The step that matters

Frying the twisted dough in boiling lard. The lard must be hot enough that the dough crisps and browns quickly on the outside. If the fat is too cool, the dough absorbs more oil and turns greasy and heavy before it cooks through.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, egg, butter, flour. 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.

More crullers recipes

French 5Pastry 4Delicate 3New York 3Plain 3 See all 103 →

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