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Dessert

Dough Nuts

Small fried dough balls made with flour, currants, sugar, cinnamon, yeast, butter, milk, and egg, dusted with castor sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Dough Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Cream the yeast with 1 teaspoon of sugar.

  2. Dissolve the butter.

  3. Add the lukewarm milk.

  4. Beat the egg and stir it into the milk mixture.

  5. In a bowl, mix the flour, sugar, cinnamon, a pinch of salt, and cleaned currants.

  6. Combine the dry ingredients with the milk mixture to form a smooth dough.

  7. Beat the dough well.

  8. Let it rise for 1 to 2 hours until very light.

  9. Knead the dough until smooth.

Fry and finish

  1. Shape it into very small balls.

  2. Drop the balls into smoking hot fat.

  3. Fry for 5 minutes.

  4. Drain on paper.

  5. Dust well with castor sugar.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cinnamon + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Flour + buttertop 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

Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure.
Yeast
Produces gas during rising, making the dough light and airy.
Egg
Adds richness and helps bind the dough for a tender crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavour.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and yeast to form the dough.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit throughout the dough.

The step that matters

Let it rise for 1 to 2 hours until very light. The yeast needs enough time to produce gas and develop the dough's airy texture. Under-proofed dough fries up dense and heavy, while the frying fat must be smoking hot so the balls cook through without absorbing excess oil.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, cinnamon, butter, egg, milk. 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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