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Rice Flour Puffs

Rice flour puffs are fried dough made with rice flour, salt, boiling water, eggs, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and egg 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 ↓

Rice Flour Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine rice flour and salt.

  2. Add boiling water and mix well.

  3. Beat the eggs and stir them into the mixture.

Fry

  1. Heat lard in a pan until boiling hot.

  2. Fry spoonfuls of the mixture in the hot lard until golden brown.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Rice + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Rice + eggtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,350 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Flour and egg 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

Rice flour
Forms the main body of the batter, with starch that thickens when heated.
Boiling water
Hot water gelatinizes the flour starch, making a soft dough that puffs when fried.
Eggs
Add protein and moisture that help the batter bind and set during frying.
Lard
Hot fat cooks the batter quickly, crisping and browning the outside of each puff.

The step that matters

Frying in very hot lard. Lard must be very hot so the outside of each spoonful sets quickly; otherwise the batter soaks up fat, becomes greasy and fails to puff.

“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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