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Dessert

Sour-cream Crullers

Sour cream crullers are fried dough pastries made with sugar, butter, egg, sour cream, flour, baking soda, and dusted with powdered sugar and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Sour-cream Crullers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Cream the sugar and butter together until light.

  2. Add the beaten egg and whip well.

  3. Stir in the sour cream.

  4. Gradually work in the flour mixed with baking soda until a stiff dough forms.

Fry and finish

  1. Fry spoonfuls of the dough in deep Cottolene until golden brown.

  2. While warm, dust with powdered sugar and cinnamon.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps it become light and tender when creamed with butter.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and tenderness, and creaming it traps air for a lighter texture.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds richness and structure.
Sour cream
Adds moisture, tang, and tenderness to the dough.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that lets the dough hold its shape while frying.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour cream's acidity to help the crullers rise and brown.

The step that matters

Frying the dough until golden brown. The oil must be deep and hot enough to cook the center as the outside browns. If it is too cool, the crullers absorb excess oil and turn greasy; if too hot, they brown before cooking through.

Swap the cinnamon

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonthe original
  3. Capersfits less well
  4. Jalapenofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, cream, 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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