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Dessert

Sour Milk Doughnuts

Sour milk doughnuts are fried dough pieces made with eggs, sugar, butter, sour milk, baking soda, nutmeg, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Sour Milk Doughnuts

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the eggs until light.

  2. Add sugar, melted butter, sour milk with dissolved baking soda, and grated nutmeg.

  3. Mix in enough flour to form a soft dough.

Shape and fry

  1. Flour a board and roll out the dough.

  2. Cut into desired shapes and fry in hot oil until golden.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour 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

Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure as they set.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with baking soda to lift the dough and add tang.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk's acid to release gas, helping the doughnuts rise.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown during frying.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the soft dough together.

The step that matters

Fry in hot oil until golden. If the oil is too cool, doughnuts absorb excess oil and turn greasy; if too hot, the outside browns before the centre cooks. Steady, moderately hot oil cooks them through evenly.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, butter, milk, flour):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, butter, milk, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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