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Bread

Entire Wheat Bread

A loaf of bread made with whole wheat flour, milk, sugar, salt, yeast, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and wheat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Entire Wheat Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Scald the milk. Add the sugar and salt. Let the mixture cool.

  2. Add the dissolved yeast cake and lukewarm water. Mix in the fine granulated wheat with a broad knife or spoon.

  3. Cover the mixture. Let it rise for about 3 hours, or until it doubles in size.

  4. Cut the dough down.

Shape and bake

  1. Turn it into buttered pans.

  2. Let it rise again.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for about 50 minutes.

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 + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + wheattop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,071 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Fine granulated wheat
Forms the bulk of the dough and provides the structure of the loaf.
Yeast cake
Produces gas as it ferments, making the dough rise and become light.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, softening the crumb and aiding browning.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and browning to the crust.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise until it doubles. Yeast gas expands the dough's gluten network to build volume. Rising too short leaves a dense loaf, while over-rising weakens the structure so it may collapse in the oven.

“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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