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Dessert

Beignets of Rice

Rice beignets are fried or baked dough made from cooked rice, milk, eggs, and sugar, then coated in breadcrumbs and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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 ↓

Beignets of Rice

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the rice

  1. Soak the rice in water, then drain it.

  2. Boil the rice in milk with sugar and butter until tender.

  3. Let the rice cool, then mix in the egg yolks and whole egg.

Shape and coat

  1. On a floured surface, shape the rice mixture into stripes.

  2. Smooth the stripes with a knife dipped in egg, then coat with egg, bread crumbs, and flour.

Cook and finish

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) or fry until golden.

  2. Sprinkle with sugar and glaze with a hot iron.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

Rice
Cooked until tender, it forms the soft, starchy body of the beignet.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to give it a creamy, moist texture.
Egg yolks
Bind the cooled rice mixture and add richness and structure.
Whole egg
Adds binding and helps hold the shaped stripes together.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden outer coating during baking or frying.

The step that matters

Let the rice cool before mixing in the eggs. Adding eggs to very hot rice can scramble them and cause uneven binding. Cooling lets the yolks and whole egg blend smoothly and gives the mixture enough firmness to shape.

“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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