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Dessert

Raised Doughnuts

A fried doughnut made from a thick batter of milk, sugar, yeast, flour, and salt, fried in lard and suet.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Raised Doughnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine the milk, sugar, yeast, and salt.

  2. Stir in enough flour to create a thick batter and let it rise overnight.

  3. In the morning, add just enough flour to make the dough thick enough to roll out to about 1 inch thick.

Shape and fry

  1. Cut the dough into squares about 1.5 inches and stretch them out as you drop them into hot fat.

  2. Fry the doughnuts thoroughly in boiling hot lard and suet.

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Yeast
Produces gas as it ferments, making the dough rise and become light.
Flour
Forms the gluten structure that holds the dough and gives it body.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, hydrating the flour to form the dough.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and gentle browning.
Lard and suet
Fat that conducts heat for frying and gives a crisp, browned exterior.

The step that matters

Frying in hot fat. If the fat is not properly hot, doughnuts absorb excess oil and turn greasy and heavy. Frying them thoroughly at a steady boiling-hot temperature cooks the centre through while the outside browns.

“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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