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Dessert

Bread Doughnuts

A fried doughnut made from bread dough, sugar, egg, butter, and salt, served with sugar or cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Bread Doughnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix the bread dough, sugar, egg, butter, and salt together.

  2. Set the mixture aside to rise.

Fry and serve

  1. Once risen, pull the dough out with your hands until very light.

  2. Break off pieces with your hands and drop them into hot lard to fry.

  3. Sprinkle with sugar or cinnamon before serving.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread dough
Provides the yeasted structure that rises and gives the doughnuts their light, chewy crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the exterior brown lightly during frying.
Egg
Adds richness and structure, helping the dough hold its shape and texture.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer flavor in the finished doughnut.

The step that matters

Pulling the risen dough until very light. Gently stretching the dough keeps the gas bubbles from the rise intact, so the doughnuts fry up light rather than dense. Overworking it can knock out that air.

“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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