Skip to main content
Dessert

Apple Snowballs

Apple Snowballs are apples wrapped in rice, boiled, and served with sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rice and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,311 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Snowballs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Wash the rice and boil it in plenty of water for 10 minutes.

  2. Drain the rice and let it cool.

Assemble and cook

  1. Peel the apples and remove the cores using a vegetable cutter.

  2. Fill each apple's core with a small piece of butter and some sugar.

  3. Enclose each apple in rice and tie them in separate cloths.

  4. Boil the wrapped apples for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Serve with Sweet Sauce.

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. Rice + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,311 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Rice
Forms a starchy coating that cooks around each apple and holds its shape while boiling.
Apples
Provide the fruit centre that softens during cooking and becomes sweet and tender.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that melts into the apple core, carrying flavour through the fruit.
Sugar
Sweetens the apple centre and helps the filling taste rounded as it cooks.

The step that matters

Enclosing and tying the apples. If the rice wrapping is loose or the cloth is poorly tied, the apples can break open or lose their filling in the boiling water, so each should be wrapped snugly and secured.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, butter, sugar):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, butter, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesRice CakeRice Cake120 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipes