Why it works: Milk and wheat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓
Crumpets, or Flannel Cakes
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the batter
Warm the milk and butter together until lukewarm.
Beat the egg and add it to the milk mixture along with salt.
Stir in enough flour to form a batter, then add the yeast.
Set the batter aside to rise until light.
Cook
Grease a bake-iron and bake the crumpets like buckwheat cakes.
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.
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Milk + wheattop 6% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together2,418 recipes
Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).
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Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together81,283 recipes
Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
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Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together4,373 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Butter + wheattop 14% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together2,002 recipes
Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
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
- Wheat flour
- Forms the batter's structure once the crumpets set in the bake-iron.
- Yeast
- Produces gas that makes the batter rise, giving crumpets their open, holey texture.
- Egg
- Adds richness and helps bind the batter together.
- Milk
- Provides the liquid that hydrates the flour and dissolves the batter's other ingredients.
The step that matters
Set the batter aside to rise until light. Yeast needs time and warmth to ferment and trap gas; a batter that is under-risen will bake dense and flat instead of airy and porous.
“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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