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Bread

Indian Corn Flour Bread

A yeast‑leavened bread made from Indian corn flour and wheat flour, baked at 400°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and wheat match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 465 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Indian Corn Flour Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 100°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Pour 4 cups of boiling water over 2 cups of Indian corn flour, stirring continuously.

  2. Let it cool to warm (about 100°F/38°C).

  3. Mix in 4 cups of fine wheat flour and ¼ cup of coarse sea salt.

  4. Make a hollow in the mixture and pour in 2 quarts of thickened yeast.

  5. Let it stand overnight.

Rise and shape

  1. Knead the mixture well the next morning and let it rise for 3 hours.

  2. Divide into loaves and place in tins for 30 minutes.

Bake

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until done, about 1.5 to 2 hours.

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. Corn + wheattop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together465 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Flour + wheattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Wheat + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together681 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Indian corn flour
Gives the loaf its corn flavour and a coarser, more crumbly texture than wheat alone.
Fine wheat flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the bread structure and holds the rise.
Yeast
Produces gas as it ferments, lifting the dough so the loaves rise.
Coarse sea salt
Adds flavour and controls yeast activity to keep fermentation steady.

The step that matters

Cooling the corn mixture to warm. If the scalded corn mixture is still very hot when the yeast is added, the heat can kill the yeast, so the dough will not rise. Cooling it to warm keeps the yeast alive and active.

“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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