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Dessert

Bread Puffs

Bread puffs are fried pieces of risen bread dough, served hot with optional powdered cinnamon, sugar, and butter.

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 ↓

Bread Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Heat deep lard in a kettle until boiling.

  2. Pull out some of the dough quite thin and cut it into 2-inch lengths.

Fry

  1. Carefully drop the dough pieces into the boiling lard.

  2. Fry until puffed and golden-brown, like doughnuts.

  3. Remove with a skimmer and drain.

Serve

  1. Serve hot, optionally covered with powdered cinnamon and sugar, and enjoy with butter.

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. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Cinnamon + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  4. Bread + cinnamontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,705 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Risen bread dough
Provides the enriched dough that puffs and turns golden when fried in hot fat.
Deep lard
Transfers heat quickly to the dough, browning its surface while the inside cooks through.

The step that matters

Dropping the dough into the boiling lard. Dough added carefully to very hot fat sears and puffs at once. Crowding the pot or dropping pieces roughly can cool the fat, causing greasy, dense results.

“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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