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Bread

Aerated Malt Bread

A bread made with wheat meal, malt extract, and buttermilk, baked until done.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and buttermilk work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 674 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Aerated Malt Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Mix the dough

  1. Sift the wheat meal, cream of tartar, and carbonate of soda three times.

  2. Make a well in the center of the wheat meal.

  3. Add the malto-peptone extract, coarse sea salt, and buttermilk to the well.

  4. Dissolve the salt and malt extract in the buttermilk.

  5. Mix the mixture into a dough.

Shape and bake

  1. Weigh off 1½ pounds of dough.

  2. Shape the dough into ovals.

  3. Place the ovals in dusted oval tins.

  4. Turn the shaped dough onto a large sheet tin.

  5. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until done.

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. Cream + buttermilktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together674 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Wheat + buttermilktop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together226 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Wheat + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together681 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Wheat meal
Provides the main structure of the bread as the flour base.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the dough and reacts with the soda to help the bread rise.
Carbonate of soda
Reacts with the acid in the buttermilk and cream of tartar to produce gas for rising.
Malto-peptone extract
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown during baking.
Buttermilk
Supplies moisture and acidity that hydrate the flour and activate the leavening.

The step that matters

Sifting and combining the leavening. Cream of tartar and carbonate of soda must be evenly distributed through the flour before the liquid is added, or the bread may rise unevenly and show pockets of bitterness from concentrated soda.

“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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