Skip to main content
Bread

Raised Brown Bread

A loaf of brown bread made with Graham flour, salt, sugar, and butter.

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

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Raised Brown Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sponge

  1. Get Graham flour fresh from the mill in small quantities to prevent molding.

  2. Make a sponge the night before using white flour.

  3. Divide the sponge.

  4. Add salt and sugar to the portion for brown bread.

Make the dough

  1. Add enough Graham flour to form a nice dough, but do not overdo it.

  2. When the dough is light, shape it into small loaves.

Shape and bake

  1. Grease pie pans well with butter.

  2. Place the dough in the pan.

  3. Grease the top.

  4. Turn it over.

  5. Tuck the sides under.

  6. Keep in a warm place until light.

  7. Bake when ready.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter 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

Graham flour
Forms the bulk of the dough and gives the bread its brown, coarse texture.
White flour
Used in the sponge, building the gluten structure that lets the dough rise.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and browning to the crust.

The step that matters

Do not overdo the Graham flour. Adding too much flour makes the dough stiff and dense, limiting the gas the yeast can trap, so the loaves rise less and bake up heavy.

“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

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipesPotato BreadPotato Bread124 recipes