Skip to main content
Main

Egg Balls

Egg Balls are small dough balls made from cooked and raw egg yolks, salt, and flour, boiled in salted water or broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Egg Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Rub the cooked egg yolks to a smooth paste.

  2. Beat the raw egg yolks with a little salt.

  3. Gradually add the beaten raw yolks to the egg paste.

  4. Stir in enough flour to form a dough that can be rolled into small balls.

Cook

  1. Drop the balls into boiling salted water or broth and cook for 5 minutes.

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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Cooked egg yolks
Form a smooth, rich base paste that gives the dough body and flavour.
Raw egg yolks
Add moisture and fat, and bind the paste into a cohesive dough.
Flour
Provides starch and structure so the dough holds its shape when rolled and boiled.

The step that matters

Stir in enough flour. Too little flour leaves the dough too soft to hold its ball shape, so the balls may break apart in the boiling liquid. Too much makes them dense and tough, because flour starch and gluten build structure as it is worked in. Add it gradually and stop when the dough can be rolled.

“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.

More egg balls recipes

for Soup 46Bacon 7Mock Turtle 4 See all 90 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes