Name: Coffee Cakes, to Make
Ingredients: 2 cups cooked rice; 4 cups all-purpose flour; ¼ cup cornmeal; 1 teaspoon yeast; water as needed

Why it works: Rice and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,611 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Coffee Cakes, to Make

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Combine cooked rice, flour, cornmeal, and yeast in a bowl.
Add enough cold water to form a dough.

Rise and bake

Cover and let the mixture rise overnight.
Shape into biscuits and bake until golden.

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.

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

All-purpose flour: Provides the main structure of the dough as its proteins form gluten when mixed with water.
Yeast: Produces gas as it ferments, which makes the dough rise and become light.
Cooked rice: Adds moisture and a soft, tender body to the dough.
Cornmeal: Adds a coarser texture and a slightly gritty crumb to the dough.

“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.