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Bread

Promotion Bread Balls

Bread balls made from soaked barley, raw peanuts, rice flour, egg white, and lemon juice, served with tart small fruits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 568 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Promotion Bread Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the barley

  1. Soak the barley in enough water to cover for 12 to 36 hours until the glume begins to rise.

  2. Drain any excess water and spread the barley on paper to dry quickly in strong sunlight with a breeze.

Shape the balls

  1. Grind the dried barley and mix it with the raw peanuts.

  2. Add enough rice flour to form the mixture into small balls.

  3. Dip the balls in the beaten egg white mixed with lemon juice.

  4. Smooth with additional rice flour and serve with tart small fruits.

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. Barley + ricetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together568 recipes

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

  2. Peanut + ricetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together670 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Barley + peanuttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together19 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetylpyrazine (roast).

  4. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Barley + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together582 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

Barley
Forms the main bulk of the balls and gives them a grainy, starchy base.
Raw peanuts
Adds fat and richness, binding the ground barley into a cohesive mixture.
Rice flour
Absorbs moisture and helps the mixture hold together so it can be shaped into balls.
Egg white
Forms a thin coating that helps additional flour cling to the outside of the balls.

The step that matters

Drying the soaked barley. Excess water left on the soaked barley makes the grind pasty and the mixture hard to shape, so it should be drained and dried well before grinding.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, peanut, rice, flour, egg):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, peanut, rice, flour, 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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