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Breakfast Cakes or Rolls

A simple yeast dough made with flour, butter, milk, and yeast, shaped into rolls and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Breakfast Cakes or Rolls

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Combine flour, warmed butter, salt, milk, and dissolved yeast in a bowl to form a dough.

  2. Cover the dough and let it rise overnight near a warm place.

Shape and bake

  1. In the morning, shape the dough into rolls.

  2. Let the rolls stand for 30 minutes before baking.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for 15 to 20 minutes.

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).

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

Fine flour
Provides the structure that the dough's gluten network builds on.
Fresh german yeast
Produces carbon dioxide gas, which makes the dough rise and become light.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture of the rolls.
Milk
Adds moisture and milk proteins that help browning and a soft crumb.

The step that matters

Overnight rise. The dough must rise long enough for the yeast to produce enough gas to lighten the crumb. Keeping it near a warm place helps the yeast stay active, so the rolls rise properly before shaping and baking.

“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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