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Dessert

Apple Kuchen

A cake made with coffee cake dough, apples, sugar, milk or cream, and eggs, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Coffee and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,202 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Apple Kuchen

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Roll the coffee cake dough thin and pinch up the sides to hold the filling.

  2. Place the dough in a tin and fill it with the chopped apples.

  3. Sprinkle the sugar over the apples.

  4. Mix the milk (or cream) with the beaten yolks of the eggs and pour over the sugar.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake until golden brown.

  2. When cool, cover with the beaten egg whites, sweetened, and brown in the oven.

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. Coffee + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,202 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  2. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Coffee cake dough
Forms the base and holds the filling in the tin.
Apples
Provide the fruit filling and moisture under the topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and helps the topping brown.
Milk or cream
Adds moisture and richness to the custard layer.
Eggs
Set the milk custard and, as whites, form the browned meringue topping.

The step that matters

Browning the egg white topping. Egg whites whipped with sugar can weep or brown unevenly if underbaked or overbaked. Cooling the cake first keeps the meringue from melting and sliding off the custard.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against coffee, 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.

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