Skip to main content
Dessert

Egg Balls

Egg Balls are small, boiled dumplings made from egg yolks, flour, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Egg Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Boil the 8 eggs until hard, then place them in cold water.

  2. Shell the eggs and place the yolks in a mortar.

  3. Pound the yolks very fine and wet them with the raw yolks.

  4. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt, then dry with flour.

Shape and cook

  1. Shape the mixture into balls the size of marbles.

  2. Boil the balls in stock for a few 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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

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

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Hard-boiled eggs
Form the bulk of the mixture, giving the balls their body and firm texture.
Raw egg yolks
Add moisture and binding so the pounded yolks hold together when shaped.
Flour
Dries the mixture so the balls keep their shape and do not stick together.

The step that matters

Pound the yolks very fine. Fine pounding makes a smooth, even paste that binds well with the raw yolks. Coarse pieces leave gaps that make the balls crumble when shaped and boiled.

“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 egg balls recipes

for Soup 46Bacon 7Mock Turtle 4 See all 90 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes