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Dessert

Breakfast Puffs

A fried dough puff made from sour milk, baking soda, egg, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Breakfast Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine sour milk and baking soda.

  2. Add the beaten egg and mix well.

  3. Gradually add flour until the dough is stiff enough to roll out thinly.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll the dough to a thickness similar to wafers and cut into round shapes.

  2. Fry the rounds in hot oil like doughnuts until golden brown.

  3. Serve hot with syrup.

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with baking soda to produce gas, helping the dough rise and turn tender.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to release carbon dioxide, leavening the dough.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds structure and richness.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure and stiffness for rolling.

The step that matters

Fry the rounds in hot oil. If the oil is not hot enough, the puffs absorb excess oil and turn greasy and heavy instead of browning quickly. Hot oil seals the surface fast, so the gas from the leavening expands the dough and the rounds puff up.

“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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