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Dessert

How to Use Olive Butter

A thin batter of flour, eggs, and olive butter fried in olive butter and dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

How to Use Olive Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine flour, beaten egg yolks, and ½ cup cold water. Mix well, adding more water if necessary to achieve a thin paste.

  2. Add salt and Olive Butter, then gently fold in the beaten egg whites until frothy.

  3. Let the batter rest for at least 2 hours, but no longer than 12 hours.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat Olive Butter in a pan. Once hot, scoop a spoonful of batter and slide it into the oil.

  2. Fry until brown on one side, then turn to brown the other side. Remove with a skimmer and drain on soft brown paper.

  3. Dredge with powdered sugar and serve.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Olive + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 body of the batter, giving the pancakes their structure as it sets in the pan.
Eggs
Yolks bind the batter while whipped whites lighten it and add rise and a tender texture.
Olive butter
Adds fat and flavour to the batter and carries the heat that browns the pancakes in the pan.

The step that matters

Frying the batter in hot fat. The pan must be hot before the batter goes in. Hot oil sets the outside quickly and browns it, while a cool pan lets the batter soak up grease and stick.

“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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