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Dessert

Rice Muffins

Rice muffins made with boiled rice, sugar, butter, salt, sweet milk, yeast, and flour, baked in muffin rings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Rice Muffins

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Boil the rice until soft and dry.

  2. Stir in sugar, butter, and salt.

  3. Add sweet milk and yeast, then mix in flour.

  4. Let the mixture rise overnight.

  5. If sour in the morning, add a little baking soda dissolved in milk.

Bake

  1. Bake in muffin rings.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Flour
Forms the main structure of the muffins as its proteins and starch set during baking.
Yeast
Ferments the batter overnight, producing gas bubbles that leaven the muffins.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation and adds sweetness and browning.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and enriches the flavor.
Sweet milk
Hydrates the flour and forms the liquid base of the batter.
Rice
Cooked rice adds moisture and a soft, tender texture to the crumb.

The step that matters

Let the mixture rise overnight. The overnight rise lets yeast ferment the batter, producing gas bubbles that leaven the muffins and develop flavor. Over-long fermentation turns the batter sour, which is why the record checks for sourness in the morning.

“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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