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Dessert

Apple Tapioca

A baked dish of apples filled with sugar and cooked with tapioca in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Apple Tapioca

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the tapioca in water to cover for 1 hour.

  2. Pare and core the apples.

  3. Place the apples in a baking dish and fill the centers with sugar.

Bake and serve

  1. Add the soaked tapioca and 1 quart of water to the dish.

  2. Bake until the apples are tender.

  3. Serve warm.

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. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Tapioca
Its starch swells and thickens the cooking liquid into a pudding-like texture.
Apples
They soften as they bake and provide the main fruit flavor and body.
Sugar
It sweetens the apples and melts into a syrup that mingles with the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Bake until the apples are tender. Heat softens the apples' cell walls, but the tapioca also needs sustained heat for its starch to swell fully. Pull the dish too early and the apples stay firm and the tapioca stays grainy; baking too long can make the apples collapse.

“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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