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Bread

German Bread

German bread is a yeast‑leavened loaf made with milk, sugar, lard or butter, flour, yeast, cinnamon, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

German Bread

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 the dough

  1. Boil the milk and let it cool slightly.

  2. Mix the yeast with the warm milk to create a rising.

  3. Once light, add sugar and lard or butter, then mix in enough flour to form a soft dough.

  4. Flour a surface and roll out the dough to about ½ inch thick.

Shape and bake

  1. Divide the dough into two large pans.

  2. Make about a dozen indentations on top and place a small piece of butter in each.

  3. Sift a mixture of sugar and cinnamon over the dough.

  4. Let it rise again, then bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 15‑20 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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Milk
Provides liquid and moisture that hydrates the flour and feeds the yeast.
Baker's yeast
Ferments the sugars and produces gas that makes the dough rise and turn light.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure and chew.
Lard or butter
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and softens the texture.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast during rising and adds sweetness and browning in the bake.

The step that matters

Let it rise again before baking. A second rise lets the yeast produce more gas and relax the gluten, so the bread bakes up light rather than dense. Rising too little leaves the loaf heavy; rising too long can collapse it.

“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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