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Bread

Swiss Bunns

A sweet yeast bread with flour, sugar, butter, milk, soda, and cream tartar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By Des Moines. Plymouth church. [from old catalog] · From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and 81,283 recipes mention both. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Swiss Bunns

Ingredients

Directions

Mix and bake

  1. Mix one and one-half cups of flour, one and one-half cup of sugar, one teaspoon of butter, two teaspoons of cream tartar, one teaspoon of soda, and one cup of sweet milk.

  2. Bake in a quick oven.

Ferment overnight

  1. Stir two and one-half cups of milk, one cup of sugar, and one cup of yeast together in the evening and let the mixture stand overnight.

Shape and rise

  1. In the morning add one cup of butter, one cup of sugar, half teaspoon of soda, and let it rise again.

  2. Mold and put into pans, and let it rise a third time.

By Des Moines. Plymouth church. [from old catalog]. 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. See the original page.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Milk + teatop 11% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together738 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter share little aroma chemistry, yet 124,287 recipes mention both: they likely work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the bun's gas bubbles and shape.
Yeast
Produces gas during the long rise, leavening the dough.
Butter
Adds fat that softens the crumb and gives a richer texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and feeds the yeast, supporting browning in the oven.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter so it reacts with soda to add lift.
Soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to release gas and leaven the buns.

The step that matters

The rises before baking. Yeast dough must rise long enough to trap gas and grow light, but if it rises too long the gluten weakens and the buns can collapse or turn coarse in the oven.

“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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