Skip to main content
Dessert

Snow Balls

Snow Balls are fried dough squares cut into strips that puff into flaky balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Snow Balls

Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Snow Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the eggs and mix in the sweet milk in a bowl.

  2. Add flour until the mixture forms a stiff dough, then stir in a little coarse sea salt.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll the dough thin and cut it into 4‑inch squares using a notched pastry cutter.

  2. Heat hot lard in a pan.

  3. Mark each square into strips ½ inch wide, leaving a ½ inch border around the edge.

  4. Pick up the squares by alternating strips and lay them in the hot lard sideways.

  5. Fry until they puff up into flaky balls.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure to the fried pastry.
Flour
Forms the stiff dough whose gluten network holds the shape during frying.
Hot lard
Fries the squares quickly, driving moisture out so they puff and crisp.

The step that matters

Laying the squares in the hot lard. Dough placed in lard that is not hot enough absorbs fat and turns heavy instead of puffing. Steam from the moisture in the dough expands it quickly when the fat is hot, which creates the flaky, hollow balls.

“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 snow balls recipes

Rice 17 See all 31 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes