Dinner Rolls Lab249 recipes
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Dinner rolls around the world

242 dinner roll recipes in 5 languages: English 173, French 39, Italian 10, Portuguese 10 and Spanish 10. Each is reduced to grams per 100 g of flour, the same as everywhere in the lab, so a French page and an American one line up. English, the largest group, is the one the others are compared with.

The language is the page's, not the cook's country: a French page may be from Quebec, a Portuguese one from Brazil, a Dutch one from Belgium. Each language's lines are read in its own words and units, and a recipe that gives “a pinch” of salt counts a pinch.

Also in the lab, too few to compare (under 8 recipes): German 5 and Dutch 2.

Where they part from English

The clearest differences for each language, medians per 100 g of flour. Only differences large enough to matter and unlikely to be chance are listed (how below).

  • Italian 10 recipesItalian recipes use about half as much yeast as English ones (0.9% against 1.8% of the flour weight).
  • Spanish 10 recipesSpanish recipes use about half as much sugar as English ones (4.8% against 10% of the flour weight) and 33% less yeast (1.2% against 1.8%).
  • French 39 recipesFrench recipes use 15% less liquid than English ones (53% against 63% of the flour weight).

Portuguese (10) shows no clear difference from English on any ingredient.

Every ingredient, language by language

Grams per 100 g of flour. One row a language, largest first.

middle half, and the median (the number at right; when most use none, the share that uses any)middle half of every recipesmall number after a name: recipes

Liquid
Butter
Sugar
Egg
Yeast
Salt

The typical batch in each language

The median of each language's recipes for every ingredient, scaled to 500 g of flour. No single recipe is exactly this. Under each, the recipe nearest its language's medians.

The medians and middle halves as a table
Median and middle half per 100 g of flour, by language
LanguageLiquidButterSugarEggYeastSalt
English 17363%54% to 70%15%11% to 22%10%6.7% to 13%11%0% to 17%1.8%1.4% to 2.2%1.5%1.2% to 1.8%
French 3953%45% to 62%15%10% to 20%10%7.8% to 12%10%4.4% to 20%1.4%1.3% to 1.9%1.5%1.2% to 1.7%
Italian 1055%50% to 64%12%10% to 13%13%12% to 14%10%3.6% to 14%0.9%0.7% to 1.1%1.5%1.3% to 1.6%
Portuguese 1060%54% to 64%9.1%8.2% to 19%14%8.3% to 19%9.6%2.3% to 10%1.8%0.9% to 3.5%1.2%1.1% to 1.5%
Spanish 1062%58% to 65%9.6%8.3% to 11%4.8%4% to 7.2%9.6%0.9% to 17%1.2%0.8% to 1.3%1.6%1.4% to 1.9%

How the comparison works

A language gets a row with at least 8 recipes. Each is compared with the English recipes on every ingredient, and a difference is listed only when it clears two bars: the medians sit at least a third of the middle half of all recipes apart (about half a standard deviation, a medium effect), and a rank test puts the gap at 3 standard errors or more, so a language with few recipes needs a large difference. For an ingredient many recipes skip, the share using none counts too: at least 25 points apart, at the same 3 standard errors.

Every ingredient is tested for every language, a few dozen tests per lab, which is why the bar is higher than the usual two standard errors. Salt is listed last when it differs: many recipes give it as a pinch or leave it to taste. Shares and “more than” percentages are rounded down, so none is an overstatement.

These are what recipe writers in each language do, not rules of each country's cooking. A language with 8 to 20 recipes may come mostly from a few sites; each recipe page names its source.