Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓
Puff Paste No. 1
Ingredients
Directions
Wash the butter and chill it until hard.
Rub ¼ pound of butter into the flour until it looks granulated.
Dissolve the salt in the ice water and mix it into the flour to form a stiff dough.
Divide the remaining ¾ pound of butter into six equal parts.
Roll out the dough to ½ inch thick and place one part of butter in small bits evenly spaced on top.
Sprinkle with some reserved flour, fold the dough over the butter, and then fold the other end to meet it.
Flour the rolling pin and roll the dough out to ½ inch thick again.
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.
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Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 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
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