Skip to main content
Dessert

Rice Balls

Rice Balls are a sweet custard-like dish made from milk, rice flour, butter, and salt, served with sugar and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Rice Balls

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Mix the rice flour with a little cold water to form a paste.

  3. When the milk begins to boil, stir in the rice flour mixture.

  4. Continue stirring until the mixture thickens like custard.

  5. Add the butter and salt and stir until the butter melts.

Shape and serve

  1. Wet custard cups.

  2. Fill the cups with the mixture and let the filled cups cool.

  3. Turn the cooled cups onto a large dish.

  4. Serve with sugar and cream or any sweet sauce.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Milk
Forms the creamy base that thickens into a custard.
Rice flour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells with heat, setting the mixture firm when cooled.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, softer texture.

The step that matters

Continue stirring until the mixture thickens like custard. Rice flour starch can settle and scorch on the bottom of the pan if left unstirred, and it needs to be fully heated to thicken properly. Constant stirring keeps it smooth and evenly cooked.

“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.

More rice balls recipes

Cheese 5Fried 5 See all 25 →

You might also like

Rice CakeRice Cake120 recipesRice CreamRice Cream43 recipesRice JellyRice Jelly42 recipesRice PuddingRice Pudding22 recipes