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Dessert

Buttermilk Doughnuts

A fried doughnut made with buttermilk, sugar, baking soda, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,324 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Buttermilk Doughnuts

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a mixing bowl, combine sugar, baking soda, and egg; beat well.

  2. Add buttermilk, reserving about 1 tablespoon to dissolve the baking soda.

  3. Mix in the dry ingredients with the flour, beating until smooth before adding all the flour.

  4. Use just enough flour to roll and handle the dough easily.

Fry

  1. Fry in hot deep fat.

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. Nutmeg + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Buttermilk + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Sugar + buttermilktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bread flour
Builds the gluten network that gives the dough its structure.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds richness and structure.
Buttermilk
Adds moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in buttermilk to produce gas, helping the doughnuts rise.
Baking powder
Provides additional leavening for lift.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown when fried.

The step that matters

Use just enough flour to roll and handle the dough. Extra flour is worked into the dough as gluten develops, which makes the doughnuts tough and dense. Using only enough flour to handle the dough keeps them tender.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, nutmeg, cream, buttermilk, bread, 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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