Name: Rice Bread
Ingredients: 1 pound rice; yeast; 5 pounds wheat or barley meal

Why it works: Rice and wheat match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 423 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Rice Bread

Ingredients

1 pound rice
yeast
5 pounds wheat or barley meal

Directions

Make the dough

Boil the rice gently until it forms a thick paste.
Mix the rice paste with the usual quantity of yeast.
Combine with 5 pounds of wheat or barley meal to form a dough.

Rise and bake

Allow the dough to rise.
Bake in the usual way.

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.

Rice + wheattop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together423 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice: Cooked into a thick paste that adds moisture and softness to the dough.
Yeast: Produces gas as it ferments, making the dough rise.
Wheat or barley meal: Forms the main structure of the dough through its proteins and starches.

“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.