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Bread

To Make Turnip Bread

A bread made from boiled and mashed turnips mixed with coarse wheat meal, yeast, salt, and water.

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 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the turnips

  1. Peel, wash, and boil the turnips until soft.

  2. Mash the turnips and press out most of the water.

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

Make and rise the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine yeast, salt, and enough water to form a dough.

  2. Knead the dough well and let it rise in a warm place.

Bake

  1. Shape the dough into loaves and place them in the oven.

  2. Bake at 400°F (200°C) 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.

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
Provide moisture and bulk, giving the bread a soft, moist crumb.
Coarse wheat meal
Forms the main structure of the dough and gives the bread its body.
Yeast
Ferments the dough so it rises and becomes lighter in texture.

The step that matters

Pressing out the turnip water. Turnips hold a lot of water, and too much of it makes the dough sticky and slow to hold its shape. Pressing out most of it before mixing keeps the dough workable and the loaves firm.

“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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