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Dessert

Cheese Straws

Cheese Straws are thin, crisp strips of dough flavored with cheese and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cheese and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,962 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cheese Straws

Oven, in the book's wordsA rather slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a rather slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the dough

  1. Sift the flour, salt, and cayenne into a bowl.

  2. Rub in the butter until well combined.

  3. Add the grated cheese and mix into a stiff paste with the egg yolk and enough water.

  4. Roll out the dough thinly.

Cut and bake

  1. Cut the rolled dough into strips.

  2. Cut out some rings.

  3. Bake the rings in a 300°F (150°C) oven until crisp and very pale brown.

Assemble and serve

  1. Thread the straws through the rings.

  2. Place the threaded straws on lace paper on a dish.

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. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Pepper + cheesetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,861 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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 dough that holds the straws together.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the dough short and crumbly when baked.
Grated cheese
Adds flavour and fat, and helps the dough bind into a paste.
Egg yolk
Binds the dough and adds richness to the texture.

The step that matters

Bake the rings until crisp and very pale brown. Baking low and slowly dries the dough so it turns crisp. Browning too far makes the rings bitter, while underbaking leaves them soft and chewy.

“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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