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Dessert

Bran Coffee

A baked mixture of wheat bran, oat flakes, corn meal, and molasses.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and corn 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 ↓

Bran Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Mix the wheat bran, oat flakes, and corn meal together.

  2. Stir in the molasses and mix with your hands to avoid lumps.

  3. Place the mixture in a drip pan.

Bake

  1. Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C), stirring every 5 to 10 minutes for 1½ to 2 hours until it is a nice brown.

  2. Be careful to avoid burning.

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. Wheat + corntop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together465 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Wheat + molassestop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together702 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Corn + molassestop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together644 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Wheat bran
Forms the dry bulk of the mixture, giving it a hearty, chewy texture.
Oat flakes
Add body and a toasty, grainy texture as they bake.
Corn meal
Adds a coarser texture and helps the mixture brown as it dries.
Porto rico molasses
Adds sweetness and moisture, and deepens the brown color during baking.

The step that matters

Baking and stirring until brown. The sugars in molasses caramelize and can scorch at high heat, so frequent stirring spreads the heat evenly and prevents burnt patches before the mixture is uniformly brown.

“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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