My top 3, in order: cooking onions and garlic together, then baking bread, then making curry.
Curry! 100% I smell that and I’m just happy.
Not the most mouth-watering, but the most comforting: freshly steamed white rice. It just smells clean and warm and inviting to me.
I recently made homemade treats for my dog using sweet potatoes and oat flour. My whole house smelled like roasted sweet potatoes for hours afterwards, and it was like being in heaven’s kitchen.
Have you a recipe to share for your sweet potato oat dog treats?
- 2 cups oat flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 cup sweet potatoes, cooked peeled, and mashed
- 1 egg
- 1 tablespoon maple syrup (optional)
- In a bowl, combine oat flour and baking powder. Mix well.
- In a larger bowl, combine sweet potatoes, egg, and maple syrup. Mix well.
- Add oat mixture to sweet potato mixture and mix until it forms a dough. It should be similar to cookie (US)/biscuit (other places) dough in consistency. If it isn’t, add more oat flour until you get it there. (Don’t worry about overworking the dough; oat flour is gluten free.)
- Shape the dough into cylinders about 1.5 to 2 cm in diameter (about an inch). Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for an hour or overnight.
- Preheat oven to 350F or 175C
- Either cut the treats from the cylinder about 1/2cm (1/4in) thick. Arrange on a baking tray, leaving a little space between each.
- Bake until just starting to brown, about 8 to 10 minutes.
- Allow to cool completely on a cooling rack. Your chewy treats are done; store in the fridge, keeps for a couple weeks.
- Optionally, after they’ve cooled, you can put them back in the oven at 200F or 100C for about an hour. This will turn them into shelf stable, crunchy treats that will will keep for, like, a long time in an airtight container. It’s basically hard tack.
You can swap out the sweet potato with peanut butter, cooked squash, or cooked pumpkin and it still works.
ETA: you can also use whole wheat flour as long as you don’t overwork the dough. If you do, you can drop the egg; it’s only there as a binder, and gluten gets the job done fine.
Most dogs (including mine) can digest gluten just fine. It can, however, interfere with digesting zinc. Huskies and a few other breeds sometimes have difficulty absorbing zinc. Hence this recipe, made for my adorable husky mix.
As a side note, if you throw in another tablespoon of maple syrup and 1/4 teaspoon of salt, these make pretty tasty people treats, too.
Top three: Frying onions in butter, baking bread, tearing into a nice orange.
In no order, freshly baked bread; freshly baked cookies, bacon.
I have a problem.
Roasting poblanos is the best smell in the world to me. I’d buy scented candles if I could.
Soaking dried soy beans, they start releasing this beautiful, creamy grassy smell the moment they hit the water.
Peeling and eating a bag of tangerines/clementines/mandarins, all the oils and juices leave this zesty haze in the air around you and on your skin and clothes and it smells incredible.
Chopping up a huge pile of ripe tomatos smells incredible too. So does fresh corriander.
gotta be pancakes for me.
Cumin. 100%
I like cooking with cumin but it smells like B.O. to me. It tastes fine tho.
My partner always says it smells like sweaty armpit. I still cook with it over his objections lol.
My friends call me crazy for mixing fried spam into Mac and cheese.
I don’t see why. It’s super common to mix sliced hot dogs into mac and cheese and they’re not that far off one another. I wouldn’t like it now because I’m old and set in my ways of what macaroni and cheese should taste like, but I’ll bet I would have liked it with spam back in the day.
Your friends are nuts. That’s delicious.
Orange/tangerine/Clementin peels.
The smell of frying Asafoetida.
The smell of orange peels is amazing. It reminds me my grandma - she left them to dry over the wood stove, so her kitchen was always smelling like orange peels. (I don’t recall what she did with the dried peels, I think that she did it because she also liked the smell.)
This morning I had diced apples, honey, and cinnamon with a bit of water warmed in a pot before adding the rest of the water / oatmeal to boil. I’m definitely a fan of warmed cinnamon smells especially in Autumn.
Same. Cinnamon french toast for me. Butter, cream, cinnamon, bread all caramelizing in the pan… Hnngggghhhhh
Something with cinnamon in the oven. Even better apple and cinnamon, but that’s probably the nostalgia of my mom’s cooking talking.
Otherwise onion and garlic cooking together with oil in a pan is always smelling amazing. And it’s part of so many recipes that I do frequently that’s it’s probably my main “cooking” smell.
Bacon, blueberry muffins, brick oven pizza, fajitas
Making a bumbu or sambal with mortar and pestle.
