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Dessert

To Make Spanish Puffs

A puff pastry made with milk, lemon, butter, flour, sugar, eggs, fried in lard and dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

To Make Spanish Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Add the chopped lemon and butter to the milk.

  3. Stir in enough flour to form a stiff ball.

  4. Let the mixture cool.

  5. In a mortar, beat the mixture with sugar, egg yolks, and egg whites until light and smooth.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat lard in a stewpan until boiling.

  2. Drop walnut-sized pieces of the mixture into the hot lard.

  3. Fry until golden brown and they swell up.

  4. Drain the fried pieces on a sieve.

  5. Serve on a folded napkin, dusted with powdered sugar.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

Butter and flour 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 a stiff dough that holds its shape and gives the puffs structure once fried.
Egg yolks
Add richness and emulsify the dough, helping it stay smooth and tender.
Egg whites
Whipped into the mixture, they add air and lightness to the puffs.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture in the dough.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and contributes to browning during frying.

The step that matters

Frying the dough pieces in hot lard. The lard must be hot enough that the dough sets quickly and swells into puffs; if it is too cool, the pieces absorb fat and turn greasy and dense instead of golden and light.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, flour, sugar, egg):

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

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

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