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Dessert

Dough Nut®

A fried doughnut filled with jam, dusted with icing sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Dough Nut®

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Rub the butter into the flour.

  2. Add the sugar and baking powder.

  3. Beat the egg and add it along with the milk.

  4. Make a stiff paste and roll it out thin.

Fill and shape

  1. Cut with a small biscuit cutter.

  2. Place a little jam in the center and wet the edges.

  3. Top with another round and pinch the edges together.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat a pan of boiling fat and drop the cakes into it.

  2. Fry until golden brown.

  3. Drain on white paper and pile on a folded serviette, dusting with icing sugar.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the dough once mixed with liquid and fat.
Butter
Rubbed into the flour to tenderise the dough and add richness.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds richness and structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking so the cakes rise and become light.
Milk
Adds moisture to bring the dough together.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown when fried.

The step that matters

Frying the cakes. The fat must be fully boiling before the cakes go in. If it is too cool, the dough absorbs fat and becomes greasy, and if the cakes sit too long before frying they may soak it up. A hot fat seals the surface quickly, so the cakes brown outside while the inside cooks through.

“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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