Skip to main content

Bread Made with Dry Yeast

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Bread Made with Dry Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Sift the flour into a large bowl.

  2. Break up the yeast cake and mix it with ½ cup of warm water until well combined.

  3. Beat in ½ cup of the flour and cover the bowl; let it sit in a warm place for 2 hours.

  4. After 2 hours, add the pint of warm water, half the butter or lard, salt, and sugar to the sponge.

  5. Stir this mixture into the flour and mix well.

  6. Turn the dough onto a floured surface and knead for 20 minutes, using as little flour as possible.

  7. Place the dough in a bowl, rub the remaining butter or lard over it, cover with a towel, and let it rise overnight in a warm place.

  8. In the morning, knead the dough in the bowl for 5 minutes without adding flour, then shape it into 3 small loaves.

  9. Place the loaves in deep pans and cut a lengthwise slit in each loaf.

  10. Cover the pans with towels and let the loaves rise until doubled in size.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 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

You might also like

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