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Dessert

Chocolate Potatos

Chocolate Potato Balls are small chocolate-coated balls made from icing sugar, ground almonds, and egg whites, served with pistachios.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and pistachio match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 693 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Chocolate Potatos

Ingredients

Directions

Make the balls

  1. Mix icing sugar, ground almonds, flavoring, and egg whites into a stiff paste.

  2. Form the mixture into small balls, dusting your hands with icing sugar to prevent sticking.

  3. Roll the balls in fine grated chocolate and create 'eyes' using a fork or scissors.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat plenty of clarified butter in a frying pan until boiling.

  2. Fry the balls, ensuring they are not too close together.

  3. Drain and serve with finely chopped pistachios sprinkled on top.

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. Almond + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together693 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Almond + chocolatetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,733 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Almond + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Chocolate + pistachiotop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together209 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Bind the almond and sugar mixture into a stiff paste that holds its shape.
Ground almonds
Provide the body and nutty flavor of the paste.
Icing sugar
Adds sweetness and helps form a smooth, workable paste.

The step that matters

Fry the balls, ensuring they are not too close together.. Crowded balls drop the fat temperature and steam instead of frying, so they absorb more butter and brown unevenly. Spacing them lets the fat stay hot and the surfaces crisp.

Swap the pistachio

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

  1. Hazelnutfits about as well
  2. Pistachiothe original
  3. Macadamia nutfits about as well
  4. Pecansfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, almond, egg, chocolate, butter. 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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