Name: Dough for Vienna Bread
Ingredients: 3 quarts milk and water mixture (equal parts); 3½ ounces press yeast; 1 ounce fine salt; flour (as needed for texture)

Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Dough for Vienna Bread

Ingredients

3 quarts milk and water mixture (equal parts)
3½ ounces press yeast
1 ounce fine salt
flour (as needed for texture)

Directions

Prepare the liquid

Pour equal parts of milk and water into a large pail and let it reach room temperature (70°F to 80°F).
Pour the milk and water mixture into a trough and mix with a small amount of flour to create a thin emulsion.

Make the dough

Crumble the press yeast into the mixture and add the fine salt, mixing thoroughly.
Cover the trough and let it sit undisturbed for 45 minutes.
Gradually incorporate enough flour from the neighboring pile to achieve the desired dough texture.

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.

Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together78,219 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Press yeast: Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes the bread rise.
Flour: Provides the gluten structure that traps gas and gives the dough its body.
Milk: Adds richness, softness and browning from milk sugars and proteins.

“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.