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Drink

Toast Water

A drink made by steeping a browned crust of bread or biscuit in boiling water with lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Toast Water

Why it works: Bread and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,445 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Toast Water

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Brown the crust of bread or biscuit until golden.

  2. Immerse the browned bread in a jug of boiling water.

  3. Add the lemon peel to the jug.

  4. Let it steep for a few minutes before serving.

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. Bread + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crust or biscuit
Browning first adds toasty, roasted flavour that infuses into the water.
Lemon peel
Its fragrant oils add aroma and a bright citrus note to the water.

“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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