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Bread

Barley Bread

A loaf made from wheat and barley flour, salt, yeast, and warm water, baked until thoroughly cooked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and barley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 185 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Barley Bread

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.

Prepare the dough

  1. Mix the wheat flour and barley flour together.

  2. Add salt, yeast, and warm water to form a dough.

  3. Divide the dough into loaves.

Bake and cool

  1. Bake the loaves in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until thoroughly baked.

  2. Let the loaves cool for 2 hours 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.

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. Wheat + barleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together185 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  2. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + barleytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together582 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Wheat flour
Provides gluten for structure, giving the loaves an elastic crumb that holds its shape.
Barley flour
Adds flavor and color, but has little gluten, so it makes the crumb denser.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide as it ferments, which makes the dough rise and become airy.

“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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