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Dessert

Crullers

A sweet fried dough pastry made with flour, lard, butter, sugar, baking powder, milk, eggs, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Crullers

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Sift the flour, sugar, and baking powder together.

  2. Rub in the lard and butter.

  3. Add the beaten eggs, extract, and milk.

  4. Mix into a smooth dough, just soft enough to handle.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll out on a well-floured board and cut into strips about 1/4 inch square.

  2. Twist into different shapes and fry in plenty of hot lard until light brown.

  3. Serve with sifted sugar.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Flour
Forms the structure of the dough once mixed with liquid and fat.
Lard
Rubbed into the flour to add tenderness and richness, and serves as the frying fat.
Butter
Adds flavor and richness to the dough, tenderizing it along with the lard.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure to the fried crullers.
Baking powder
Releases gas that helps the crullers rise and become light in the frying fat.

The step that matters

Frying in hot lard. If the lard is not hot enough, the crullers absorb excess fat and turn greasy and heavy. Enough hot lard keeps the temperature steady so they brown lightly and cook through.

Swap the nutmeg

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, milk, egg. 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 crullers recipes

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