Skip to main content
Snack

Cheese Straws

Cheese straws are thin, twisted strips of pastry made with butter, flour, bread crumbs, grated cheese, salt and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread 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 ↓

Cheese Straws

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix the butter, flour, bread crumbs, and grated cheese into a paste.

  3. Season the mixture with salt and cayenne pepper.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the paste very thin and cut it into strips that are ¼ inch wide and 6 inches long.

  2. Twist each strip several times and lay them on a buttered baking sheet.

  3. Bake for about 5 minutes until golden.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Bread + cheesetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

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

Butter
Adds fat that makes the paste rich and tender and helps the straws brown.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the paste together and lets it be rolled thin.
Bread crumbs
Absorbs fat and adds body, giving the paste a crisp, dry texture after baking.
Cheese
Adds savoury flavour and fat, and browns during baking for colour and aroma.

The step that matters

Roll out the paste very thin. Thin strips have little moisture and dry out quickly in the oven, so they become crisp. Thick strips stay soft in the centre and may not cook through evenly.

“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.

More cheese straws recipes

Cayenne 11 See all 284 →

You might also like

FrittersFritters56 recipesCrisp CrackersCrisp Crackers7 recipes