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Drink

Toast Water, or Crust Coffee

A beverage made by steeping stale bread crusts in boiling water, then sweetened and served with ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,638 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Toast Water, or Crust Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Toast stale bread crusts until dark brown, avoiding burning.

  2. Place the browned crusts in a large pitcher.

  3. Pour enough boiling water over the crusts to cover them.

Steep and serve

  1. Cover the pitcher and let steep until cold.

  2. Strain the mixture and sweeten to taste.

  3. Serve with a piece of ice in each glass.

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. Bread + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Stale bread crusts
Toasting browns the crusts, adding roasted, toasty flavour that gives the drink its coffee-like character.
Boiling water
Extracts flavour and colour from the toasted crusts as it steeps.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the toasted, slightly bitter flavour.

The step that matters

Toast the crusts until dark brown. Browning drives the Maillard reaction and caramelisation, which create the roasted flavour the drink depends on. Burnt crusts, however, add acrid bitterness that cannot be removed by straining or sweetening.

“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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