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Dessert

Berlin Pancakes

A thin pancake made with flour, sugar, ground rice, butter, egg, and milk, filled with jam and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Berlin Pancakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Combine flour, caster sugar, and ground rice in a bowl.

  2. Rub in the butter until well mixed.

  3. Beat the egg and add a little milk.

  4. Pour the egg mixture into the dry ingredients and form a stiff paste.

Shape the pancakes

  1. Roll out the paste as thinly as possible on a floured surface.

  2. Cut into rounds using a fancy cutter.

  3. Place a small amount of jam in the center of one round.

  4. Wet the edges, place another round on top, and press the edges together.

Fry

  1. Fry in hot fat until golden brown.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the stiff paste that holds the pancakes together.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds richness and structure as it sets in the fat.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderises the paste and gives a rich, crumbly texture.
Ground rice
Gives the dough a finer, slightly crisp texture than flour alone.
Caster sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps the surface brown when fried.

The step that matters

Roll out the paste as thinly as possible. A thin paste fries through and browns evenly in hot fat. Thick rounds can stay doughy inside while the outside over-browns, and a thin, well-pressed seal keeps the jam from leaking into the fat.

“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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