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Dessert

Lazy Doughnuts

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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. In a bowl, mix sugar, eggs, sour milk, melted lard, and baking soda.

  2. Add flour gradually until the mixture is as stiff as possible.

Fry

  1. Heat lard in a deep pan.

  2. Drop spoonfuls of the dough into the hot lard and fry until brown. 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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Sugar + milktop 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

Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness to the doughnuts.
Sour milk
Adds moisture and acidity, which reacts with the baking soda to lift the dough.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that helps the doughnuts rise.
Flour
Provides structure, and the amount added sets how stiff the dough is.
Lard
Adds richness and tenderness to the dough and carries the heat for frying and browning.

The step that matters

Add flour gradually until stiff. Too much flour makes the doughnuts dense and tough, while too little leaves the dough too loose to hold its shape in the hot fat. Adding it gradually lets you stop at the right stiffness.

“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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