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Plain Buns

Plain buns made from flour, sugar, yeast, milk, butter, and warm milk, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Plain Buns

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 ↓

Plain Buns

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Make a cavity in the center of the flour and stir in the yeast and lukewarm milk until it reaches the thickness of cream.

  2. Cover and let it sit for 2 hours.

  3. Melt the butter until it's oily but not hot, then stir it into the mixture with enough warm milk to form a soft paste.

  4. Sprinkle a little flour over the dough and let it rest for 1 hour.

Shape and bake

  1. Prepare a baking platter by rubbing it with butter.

  2. Mold the dough into buns the size of a large egg and place them 3 inches apart on the platter.

  3. Set the buns in a warm place for 30 minutes or until they double in size.

  4. Bake in a moderate oven (350°F / 175°C) until golden brown.

  5. Brush the buns with milk when removing them from the oven.

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

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 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. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter 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 the structure that holds the dough and lets the buns rise and set.
Yeast
Produces gas as it ferments, making the dough rise and become light.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and richness to the buns.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and feeds the yeast, and helps the crust brown.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and yeast to form the dough and adds softness.

The step that matters

Melting the butter. If the butter is too hot, it can cook the yeast and weaken rising. Melting it only until oily keeps the yeast alive so the dough can rise properly.

“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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