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Bread

To Make Mixed Bread

A bread made from a mixture of ground bean flour and wheat flour, seasoned with sea salt and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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To Make Mixed Bread

Why it works: Beans and wheat match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 166 recipes. Both carry 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol, which smells clove, smoky. The science ↓

To Make Mixed Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bean flour

  1. Send a bushel of beans to the mill to be ground into fine flour.

  2. Soak 1 peck of the bean flour in water for 3 days, changing the water daily.

  3. Drain the soaked flour in a sieve.

Make and bake the bread

  1. In a kneading trough, mix 1 peck of wheat flour with some coarse sea salt and yeast.

  2. Add the drained bean flour to the mixture and knead into a dough.

  3. Let the dough rise until it has proved, then divide it into loaves.

  4. Bake the loaves until golden brown.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Beans + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together166 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  2. Beans + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Wheat flour
Provides the main gluten structure that traps gas and holds the loaves together.
Yeast
Produces gas as it ferments, causing the dough to rise and become airy.
Dry beans
Ground and soaked into flour, adding bulk and body to the dough.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise until proved. Yeast needs time to produce enough gas for the dough to expand. Underproved dough stays dense and heavy, while overproved dough can collapse in the oven.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (wheat, flour):

  1. Milletfits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wheat, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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