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Egg Balls

Egg Balls are small fried balls made from mashed hard‑boiled egg yolks, salt, cayenne pepper, egg whites, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Egg Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Remove the yolks from the hard-boiled eggs and place them in a mortar.

  2. Add salt and cayenne pepper, then beat until smooth.

  3. Mix in the egg whites to form a paste.

Shape and fry

  1. Shape the mixture into marble-sized balls.

  2. Roll the balls in flour and fry them 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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

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

Egg and flour 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

Hard-boiled eggs
Provide the main body of the balls, with yolks forming a rich, crumbly paste.
Egg whites
Add moisture and binding so the yolk mixture holds together as a paste.
Flour
Forms a dry coating that helps the balls brown and keeps their surface from sticking.

The step that matters

Frying the coated balls. Oil that is too cool lets the flour coating absorb grease and turn heavy, while oil that is too hot browns the outside before the centre heats through. Frying at a steady moderate heat gives an even golden crust.

“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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