Skip to main content
Main

Cheese Rings

Cheese rings are fried dough rings made with butter, milk, flour, salt, cayenne, cheese, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Cheese Rings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Heat butter and milk in a saucepan until boiling.

  2. Stir in flour, salt, and cayenne or paprika, cooking until mixture leaves sides of pan.

  3. Transfer to a cold dish and beat in grated cheese and eggs, one at a time.

Shape and fry

  1. Using a pastry bag, pipe dough into ring shapes on oiled paper.

  2. Brush rings with beaten egg and fry in hot fat for 3-4 minutes until golden.

Finish and serve

  1. Sprinkle with grated cheese and serve hot with green salad.

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. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Flour
Starch gelatinises when cooked, giving the dough body and a structure that holds its shape.
Eggs
Bind the dough and set during frying, giving the rings structure and a tender interior.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and flavour and helps the dough stay tender.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the flour cooks in, forming the base of the dough.
Cheese
Adds savoury flavour and richness, and browns and melts slightly at the surface.

The step that matters

Beat in the eggs gradually. Once the flour paste is cooked, eggs must be added one at a time so the dough stays firm enough to pipe. Too much egg at once makes a slack dough that loses its ring shape in the hot fat.

“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.

You might also like

Macaroni and CheeseMacaroni and Cheese102 recipesCheese MakingCheese Making50 recipesCheese FrittersCheese Fritters34 recipesCheese OmeletteCheese Omelette31 recipes