Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓
Yeast Dumplings
Ingredients
Directions
Make a light dough with flour, water, salt, and yeast.
Cover the dough with a cloth and let it rise in a warm place for 30 minutes.
Bring a saucepan of water to a boil.
Shape the dough into round balls, about the size of a large egg.
Flatten the balls slightly and carefully place them in the boiling water.
Boil for about 10 minutes, ensuring they do not touch the bottom of the pot.
Remove the dumplings and place them in a dish.
Serve with melted butter.
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.
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Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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
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