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Dessert

Lazy Doughnuts

A fried doughnut made with eggs, sour milk, lard, baking soda, and flour.

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 ↓

Lazy Doughnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the eggs and mix in the sour milk and melted lard.

  2. Stir in baking soda and enough flour to make a stiff dough.

Fry

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the dough into hot lard and fry until golden brown.

  2. Dip the spoon in lard after each drop to prevent sticking.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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

Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness to the crumb.
Sour milk
Adds moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk's acidity to produce gas, lifting the dough as it fries.
Melted lard
Adds fat for tenderness and flavour in the dough.
Flour
Provides the structure that makes the dough stiff enough to hold its shape when dropped.

The step that matters

Dip the spoon in lard after each drop. Greasing the spoon stops the sticky dough from clinging to it, so each spoonful drops cleanly into the hot fat and keeps its round shape.

“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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