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Bread

French-bean Bread

A bread made with boiled French beans, wheat flour, yeast, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

French-bean Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Boil the white French beans until tender and strain to remove skins.

  2. Mix the bean pulp with the flour or meal in a large bowl.

  3. Add yeast and a little more salt than usual.

  4. Gradually moisten the mixture with less liquid than for regular bread to form a firm dough.

Bake

  1. Knead the dough thoroughly and let it ferment.

  2. Bake the bread as you would with regular bread.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

White french beans
Their pulp supplies starch and body, giving the bread a dense, moist crumb.
Wheat flour or meal
Gluten and starch form the main structure that holds the loaf together.
Yeast
Ferments sugars into carbon dioxide, which makes the dough rise and open up.

The step that matters

Moistening the dough. Bean pulp absorbs and holds water differently from flour alone, so adding less liquid than for regular bread is needed to get a firm dough. Adding too much makes it slack and hard to shape, while too little leaves it dry and stiff.

“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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