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Dessert

Cheap Crust for Dumplings

A simple dough made from potatoes, milk, butter, salt, and flour, used to encase dumpling fillings.

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

Cheap Crust for Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender.

  2. Mash the potatoes with milk, butter, and salt until smooth.

  3. Add flour gradually to form a dough.

Shape the dumpling

  1. Flour a large cloth on your work surface.

  2. Roll out the dough and place the filling in the center.

  3. Roll the dough around the filling to form a large dumpling.

  4. Tie the cloth securely and place the dumpling in boiling water.

Cook

  1. Boil for about 1.5 hours.

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. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Potatoes
Provide the starchy base that gives the dough its body and soft texture.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness to the mashed potato dough.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, more tender dough.
Flour
Binds the mashed potato into a dough that holds its shape when wrapped.

The step that matters

Add flour gradually to form a dough.. Adding flour gradually lets you stop once the dough is workable. Too much flour makes the mashed potato dense and tough, since gluten and starch develop with extra mixing and handling.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Potatothe original
  2. Arrowrootfits about as well
  3. Leekfits less well
  4. Shallotfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, 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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