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Dessert

Doughnuts

A fried doughnut made with butter, sugar, flour, baking powder, egg, and milk, then dredged in sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Doughnuts

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 ↓

Doughnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the butter, sugar, and egg together until creamy.

  2. Sift the flour and baking powder together.

  3. Add the sifted flour and baking powder to the butter mixture.

  4. Stir in the milk to form a soft dough.

  5. Flour the board well.

  6. Roll the dough to ½ inch thickness.

  7. Cut out dough with a large biscuit cutter.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry in plenty of hot lard until light brown.

  2. Dredge with sugar.

  3. Serve cold.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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

Butter
Creams with sugar to add richness and tenderness to the dough.
Egg
Adds structure and richness, binding the creamed mixture together.
All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the dough once moistened.
Royal baking powder
Releases gas during frying, helping the doughnuts rise and turn light.
Milk
Hydrates the flour to form a soft dough.

The step that matters

Fry in plenty of hot lard until light brown. Frying in enough hot fat keeps the oil temperature steady so the dough cooks through and absorbs little grease. Oil that is too cool makes doughnuts heavy and greasy, while oil that is too hot browns the outside before the inside is cooked.

“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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