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Dessert

Another Way to Make German Puffs

A sweet pastry made with butter, almonds, rose water, eggs, flour, and sugar, baked in buttered cups.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Another Way to Make German Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the butter until creamy.

  2. Blanch the almonds.

  3. Pound the almonds with rose water.

  4. Beat the egg yolks.

  5. Beat the egg whites.

Make the batter

  1. Mix the beaten yolks, beaten whites, butter, almonds, flour, and sugar together.

  2. Sweeten with pounded loaf sugar.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in buttered cups until golden.

  2. Serve with a sweet sauce.

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. Almond + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Almond + rosetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,465 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Fresh butter
Adds richness and moisture, giving the puffs a tender, creamy crumb.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the batter while adding structure when set by heat.
Egg whites
Whipped air gives the puffs lightness and helps them rise in the oven.
Sweet almonds
Provide body, nutty flavour and fat that keeps the puffs moist.
Flour
Gives the batter enough structure to hold its shape while baking.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites.. Whites must be beaten to hold air; underbeaten whites collapse and give flat, dense puffs, while overbeaten whites turn dry and grainy and lose their ability to expand.

“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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