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Drink

Toast-watee

A beverage made by soaking toasted Graham bread in boiling water and sweetening the resulting liquid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,638 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Toast-watee

Ingredients

Directions

Make the toast water

  1. Toast the thin slices of Graham bread thoroughly.

  2. Break the toasted bread into a bowl.

  3. Pour enough boiling water over the bread to cover it.

  4. When cold, strain off the water.

Finish and serve

  1. Sweeten the strained water slightly.

  2. Serve freshly made.

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. Bread + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 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

Graham bread
Toasting browns the bread and gives the water a toasty, roasted flavor.
Boiling water
Extracts flavor and color from the toasted bread into the liquid.

The step that matters

Toasting the bread thoroughly. Toasting browns the starches and sugars through Maillard browning and caramelization, which builds the toasty flavor of the water. Under-toasted bread gives a weak, flat-tasting result.

“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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