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Bread, Biscuits, and Cakes

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Bread, Biscuits, and Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a large bowl, add the flour and create a hollow in the center without clearing it completely.

  2. Mix the yeast with 1 pint of warm milk-and-water until smooth.

  3. Pour the yeast mixture into the hollow in the flour and stir until a thick batter forms without lumps.

  4. Cover the batter with flour and a clean cloth, then place it in a warm area to rise.

  5. Check after an hour; it should have risen and formed bubbles.

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

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