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Dessert

Cheese Straws

Cheese Strawe is a pastry made with flour, butter, lard, and grated cheese, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cheese and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,962 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cheese Straws

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the pastry

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, combine the flour, butter, and lard to make a soft pastry.

Add the cheese

  1. Roll out the pastry thinly and sprinkle half of the grated cheese on top.

  2. Work the cheese into the pastry, then roll it out again and sprinkle the remaining cheese.

  3. Work in the cheese, roll the pastry thin, and cut it into narrow strips.

Shape and bake

  1. Twist the strips and place them on a baking sheet.

  2. Bake in the preheated oven 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.

  1. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + cheesetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,860 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the pastry dough.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the pastry tender and flaky as it bakes.
Lard
Adds fat that keeps the pastry short and tender.
Grated cheese
Adds savory flavor and browns during baking.

The step that matters

Working the cheese into the pastry. Overworking the dough develops gluten and makes it tough, while the cheese must be evenly distributed so the strips bake consistently. Keep the dough cool and handle it gently.

“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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