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Coffee Kolls

Coffee Kolls are sweet rolls made with bread dough, butter, sugar, and dried currants, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Coffee Kolls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Incorporate the butter and sugar into the bread dough.

  2. Add the dried currants and dust with flour and sugar.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the mixture into small rolls.

  2. Dip each roll into melted butter.

  3. Place the rolls in tins and let them rise for a short time.

  4. Bake 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Bread + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

Bread dough
Provides the soft, airy crumb structure that holds the rolls together.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness, and the melted coating helps the rolls brown.
White sugar
Sweetens the rolls and helps them brown in the oven.
Dried currants
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy bits of fruit throughout the rolls.

The step that matters

Bake until golden. Baking only until golden keeps the rolls from drying out, while stopping too early leaves the dough pale and underbaked inside. Sugar and butter brown through the Maillard reaction and caramelization, so color is a useful cue.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, sugar, 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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