Skip to main content
Dessert

Apple Fritters

Apple fritters are fried apple slices coated in a batter of flour, egg, and oil, served hot with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Peel and slice apples into ¼‑inch thick rounds, removing the core.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, salt, oil, and egg yolk, adding water gradually until smooth and creamy.

  2. Whip the egg white until firm and fold it into the batter.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat fat in a frying pan until hot.

  2. Dip each apple slice in the batter and fry one at a time until golden brown, turning as needed.

  3. Serve hot, sprinkled with sugar and optionally drizzled with lemon juice or spirits.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Flour and egg 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the batter that coats and holds the fried crust together.
Egg white
Whipped and folded in, it lightens the batter and helps it puff while frying.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps the batter blend smoothly with the flour and oil.
Oil
Adds fat to the batter, giving a tender texture and a more even golden colour.
Apples
The main ingredient, whose slices are coated in batter and cooked until tender.

The step that matters

Keeping the fat hot. The fat must be hot before frying. If it is too cool, the batter absorbs more oil, the fritters cook slowly, and they turn out greasy and heavy. Hot fat sets the crust quickly, so the inside cooks through with a crisp outside.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, egg, apple, sugar):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, egg, apple, sugar. 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.

More apple fritters recipes

Potato 3 See all 377 →

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes