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Dessert

Raised Doughnuts

A yeast doughnut made with milk, eggs, sugar, butter, salt, nutmeg, soda, and flour, then fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Raised Doughnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Scald the milk and let it cool.

  2. Dissolve the yeast in the cooled milk.

  3. Add eggs, sugar, melted butter, salt, nutmeg, and soda.

  4. Mix in enough flour to form a stiff dough.

  5. Let the dough rise overnight.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll out the dough and cut with a doughnut cutter.

  2. Let the cut dough rise until very light.

  3. Fry the doughnuts 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. 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

Yeast
Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes it rise and become light.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping bind the dough and give tenderness.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the stiff dough its structure.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer flavour in the dough.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and browning during frying.

The step that matters

Let the cut dough rise until very light. Yeast needs time and warmth to produce enough gas for a light, airy texture. Under-proofed doughnuts stay dense and may shrink or toughen when fried.

Swap the nutmeg

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

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

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

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