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Bread

Brown Bread

Brown bread made with malt, wheat meal, water, and salt, kneaded and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Brown Bread

Why it works: Malt and wheat work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Brown Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. Make a sponge with the wheat meal and one-third of the total water needed.

Prepare the malt

  1. Mix the malt with water and heat in a tin or iron vessel, stirring until just below boiling.

  2. Add enough water to the malt mixture to make up the remaining two-thirds.

Combine and bake

  1. Combine the prepared malt with the sponge and add a little salt.

  2. Knead the dough as usual and let it rise before baking.

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. Malt + wheattop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together64 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

Malt
Adds sweetness and flavour, and helps the crumb stay moist.
Granular wheat meal
Forms the main structure of the dough and absorbs the water.

The step that matters

Heating the malt mixture until just below boiling. Malt is sticky and can scorch on the base of a thin vessel if overheated. Stirring while it heats spreads the heat evenly and keeps it from catching, so the malt blends smoothly into the dough.

“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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