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Vienna Rolls

Vienna rolls are sweet pastry rolls made from a soft dough of flour, lard, milk, baking powder, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Vienna Rolls

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Vienna Rolls

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 dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, and salt.

  3. Rub the lard into the flour mixture.

  4. Add enough sweet milk to form a soft dough.

Shape the rolls

  1. Roll out the dough and cut it with a round cutter.

  2. Fold each round over like a turnover, wetting the edges with milk to seal.

  3. Brush the tops with milk for a glossy finish.

  4. Place the rolls on a baking pan, ensuring they do not touch.

Bake

  1. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Forms the structure of the dough once mixed with liquid.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven so the rolls rise and become light.
Lard
Coats flour particles to tenderize the dough and add a short, flaky texture.
Sweet milk
Hydrates the flour to form a soft dough and helps the tops brown.

The step that matters

Rub the lard into the flour mixture. Rubbing the fat into the flour until fine and evenly distributed coats the flour particles and limits gluten development, keeping the rolls tender rather than tough.

“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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