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Dessert

Doughnuts

Doughnuts are fried sweet pastries made with flour, eggs, sugar, milk, butter, baking soda, cream of tartar, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Doughnuts

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 ↓

Doughnuts

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the eggs and sugar together.

  2. Dissolve the baking soda in the milk, add the melted butter, and mix with the egg and sugar mixture.

  3. Sift the flour and cream of tartar together twice, then beat well and add the nutmeg.

  4. Ensure the dough is not too stiff; adjust flour as needed.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll out the dough, cut with a doughnut cutter, and fry in hot lard.

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

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

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

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

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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

Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together when fried.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the dough so it reacts with baking soda to help it rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in cream of tartar to produce gas that lightens the dough.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the doughnut brown during frying.

The step that matters

Keep the dough soft, not stiff. Too much flour makes the dough stiff and dense, so the doughnuts fry up tough. Adjust flour gradually so the dough stays soft enough to roll and cut cleanly.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, egg, sugar, milk, butter, cream):

  1. Nutmegthe original
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Capersfits less well
  4. Jalapenofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, egg, sugar, milk, butter, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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 doughnuts recipes

Raised 110Plain 25Potato 18German 17Isle of Wight 16Sour Milk 14 See all 168 →

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