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Dessert

Doughnuts Without Eggs

A doughnut recipe that omits eggs, using light brown sugar, sour milk, lard, baking soda, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour 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 ↓

Doughnuts Without Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine light brown sugar, sour milk, salt, lard, and baking soda.

  2. Mix in enough flour to form a soft dough.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll out the dough and cut into doughnut shapes.

  2. Fry the doughnuts in hot oil until golden brown.

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 + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and flour 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

Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with baking soda to produce gas that lifts the dough.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in sour milk and sugar to release carbon dioxide, helping the doughnuts rise.
Light brown sugar
Adds sweetness, moisture, and browning during frying.
Flour
Provides structure, forming the dough that holds the doughnut shape.
Lard
Adds fat, giving the doughnuts a tender texture.

The step that matters

Mixing in the flour. Adding too much flour makes the dough tough and dense, because gluten develops and the dough loses the softness that lets it rise. Stop once the dough just comes together.

“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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