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Dessert

Bread Fritters

Bread fritters are fried batter made from soaked stale bread, buttermilk, flour, salt, baking soda, and hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Buttermilk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,721 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Bread Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Soak stale bread pieces in buttermilk until softened.

  2. Mash the soaked bread until smooth.

  3. Add salt and enough flour to create a stiff batter.

  4. Dissolve baking soda in hot water and mix into the batter.

Fry

  1. Fry the batter in hot oil until golden brown.

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. Buttermilk + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Bread + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Bread + buttermilktop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together69 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Bread and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,383 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

Stale bread
Provides the bulk and body that the batter is built on.
Buttermilk
Softens the bread and adds moisture and a mild tang.
Flour
Stiffens the mixture and gives the fritters structure while frying.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in buttermilk to release gas that lightens the batter.

The step that matters

Frying in hot oil. Oil that is hot enough sets the outside quickly and browns it. If the oil is too cool, the batter soaks up grease and turns heavy and oily before it cooks through.

“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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