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Cheese Sticks

Cheese sticks are baked strips of bread dough with butter and Parmesan cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cheese Sticks

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the pastry

  1. Roll out the bread dough on a floured surface.

  2. Spread with bits of firm butter and dust with flour.

  3. Fold and roll the dough, repeating until you've incorporated all the butter.

  4. Roll the pastry to ⅓ inch thick and cut into strips ½ inch wide.

Bake and coat

  1. Place the strips straight on a baking sheet and bake at 300°F (150°C) until light brown.

  2. Remove from the oven, let cool, then brush with egg white and coat with grated Parmesan.

  3. Return to the oven for 1-2 minutes to set.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + parmesan cheesetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,163 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Bread + parmesan cheesetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together577 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Bread dough
Provides the base of the pastry that bakes into a crisp, light stick.
Firm butter
Folded into the dough in layers, it creates flaky texture as it melts and steams during baking.
Egg white
Brushed on top, it binds the Parmesan so it adheres and browns during baking.
Grated parmesan cheese
Adds savory, salty flavor and browns into a crisp coating when returned to the oven.

The step that matters

Baking until light brown. Baking at 300°F only until light brown matters because the sticks continue to dry and crisp as they cool, and over-baking turns them bitter and brittle. Cooling before brushing keeps the egg white from cooking unevenly.

“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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