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Bread

Damping Wheats

A simple wheat bread made with flour, water, salt, yeast, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,373 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Damping Wheats

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.

Make the dough

  1. Combine 3 lbs of dry wheat flour with water, coarse sea salt, yeast, and sugar.

  2. Knead the mixture until smooth.

  3. Allow the dough to ferment for about 3 hours.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough into loaves and place them in a baking pan.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven 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. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Wheat + sugartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,071 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Dry wheat flour
Forms the main structure of the bread as its proteins develop into gluten when mixed with water and kneaded.
Yeast
Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes it rise and gives the bread an airy crumb.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation and contributes to browning of the crust.
Coarse sea salt
Controls yeast activity and strengthens gluten, adding flavor to the bread.

The step that matters

Knead the mixture until smooth. Kneading aligns and develops gluten strands, which trap the gas released by yeast. Under-kneaded dough rises poorly and bakes up dense.

“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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