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Bread

Bread From Milk Yeast

Bread made with milk yeast, cornmeal, boiled milk, baking soda, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Bread From Milk Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Pour enough boiling sweet milk over ½ cup cornmeal to make a batter-like thickness.

  2. Keep the mixture warm overnight in winter.

  3. Pour 1 pint of boiling water into a pitcher.

  4. Add 1 teaspoon baking soda and 2 teaspoons salt to the pitcher.

  5. Let the mixture cool until cool enough.

  6. Add flour to make a stiff batter.

  7. Mix in the cornmeal mixture.

  8. Place the pitcher in warm water, cover with a towel, and let it rise until bubbly.

Make and bake the bread

  1. Pour the yeast into a bread pan.

  2. Add 1½ pints of warm water or milk to the pan.

  3. Add enough flour to knead into loaves.

  4. Knead slightly harder than for biscuits.

  5. Bake as soon as it rises to the top of the pan.

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Cornmeal
Forms the batter-like base that ferments into the yeast starter, adding body to the bread.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic fermented batter to produce gas, helping the loaves rise.
Flour
Builds the gluten network that traps gas and gives the loaves their structure.
Warm milk or water
Hydrates the flour and keeps the yeast active so the dough can rise.

The step that matters

Bake as soon as it rises to the top of the pan. Baking when the dough has risen to the top traps gas in the gluten structure. Waiting too long lets the gas escape and the loaf can collapse or turn dense.

“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.

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