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Breakfast

The Test-breakfast of Ewald and Boas

A simple breakfast of a slice of wheat bread with water or tea, consumed on an empty stomach.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Wheat and bread match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 209 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

The Test-breakfast of Ewald and Boas

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Consume the slice of wheat bread and the water or tea on an empty stomach in the morning.

  2. One hour later, remove the contents of the stomach.

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 + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together209 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  2. Wheat + teatop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Bread + teatop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together383 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Wheat bread
Provides the starchy base of the meal.
Water or tea
Provides the liquid taken alongside the bread.

“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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