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Bread

To Make Turnip Bread

A bread made from mashed turnips and coarse wheat meal, baked with yeast and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and wheat share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Make Turnip 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 turnips

  1. Boil the turnips until soft, then drain and mash them.

  2. Press out most of the water from the mashed turnips.

Make and bake the dough

  1. Mix the mashed turnips with an equal weight of coarse wheat meal.

  2. Add yeast, salt, and enough water to form a dough.

  3. Knead the dough well and shape it into loaves.

  4. Place the loaves in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) and bake until golden.

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. Turnip + wheattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together41 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Supply moisture and a soft, tender body to the dough.
Coarse wheat meal
Forms the main structure as its gluten develops with kneading.
Yeast
Ferments sugars and produces gas that makes the dough rise.

The step that matters

Press out most of the water from the mashed turnips. Turnips hold a lot of water. Excess moisture makes the dough too wet to shape and can weaken its structure, so removing most of it keeps the dough workable.

“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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