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Dessert

Unleavened Wafers

A simple unleavened wafer made from flour, salt, and milk, baked until lightly browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk 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 ↓

Unleavened Wafers

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Mix flour and salt in a bowl.

  2. Gradually add milk to form a stiff dough.

Roll and bake

  1. Roll out the dough thinly on a floured surface.

  2. Cut into round cakes and roll them out again until very thin.

  3. Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) until lightly browned.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk 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

All-purpose flour
Provides the starch and gluten-forming proteins that give the wafers their structure.
Milk
Hydrates the flour so it forms a cohesive dough and adds a little milk sugar for browning.

The step that matters

Rolling the cakes very thin. Thin dough dries and crisps evenly in the hot oven. Thicker spots stay doughy in the middle and may brown unevenly before they are fully dry.

“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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