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Dessert

Apple Snowballs

Apple snowballs are apples wrapped in boiled rice, sweetened with sugar and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,366 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Apple Snowballs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Boil the rice in water for 15 to 20 minutes.

  2. Strain the rice and spread it on floured cloths.

Assemble and cook

  1. Peel and core the apples, placing them on the rice.

  2. Sprinkle sugar and a little lemon juice over the apples.

  3. Cover each apple entirely with rice, tie the cloths, and boil for 1 hour.

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. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  2. Rice + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,311 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Rice + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 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

Rice
Forms the starchy outer shell that encloses each apple as it cooks.
Apples
Provide the fruit filling that softens and sweetens inside the rice coating.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and adds flavor to the filling.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the apples.

The step that matters

Covering each apple entirely with rice. Any gap in the rice coating lets the apple's juices leak out and the fruit cook unevenly, so each apple needs a complete, even layer before the cloths are tied.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, sugar, lemon, flour):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, sugar, lemon, flour. 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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