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Dessert

Apple Strudel

A pastry filled with shaved apples, sugar, cinnamon, raisins, and citron, baked and finished with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Apple Strudel

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Sift the flour into a bowl and make a hole in the center.

  2. Pour in the lukewarm water, melted butter, whole eggs, egg yolks, and salt.

  3. Stir the mixture until it resembles noodle dough.

  4. Spread a tablecloth on the kitchen table.

  5. Roll out the dough as thin as possible.

  6. Stretch the dough as needed.

Fill and roll

  1. Pour melted butter over the dough.

  2. Add shaved apples, sugar, cinnamon, seeded raisins, and finely cut citron.

  3. Roll the dough.

  4. Place the rolled dough in a well-buttered pan, adding butter flakes on top.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake for about 15 minutes.

  2. Pour cream over the strudel.

  3. Finish baking for another 15 minutes.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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

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

  5. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the dough's structure once mixed with liquid and eggs, giving the strudel its sheet-like body.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the dough bind and bake firm yet tender.
Butter
Adds fat that keeps the thin layers tender and helps them brown in the oven.
Cream
Poured over the strudel, it adds moisture and richness to the baked pastry.
Apples
Provide the main moist filling, softening as they bake while keeping their shape.

The step that matters

Rolling the dough as thin as possible. Thin, stretched dough bakes into crisp, flaky layers; thick dough stays dense and doughy. Keeping it even also helps it bake through evenly.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, egg, sugar, cinnamon, raisin, 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.

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