Skip to main content
Bread

Water Bread

A simple bread made with butter, salt, boiling water, yeast cake, sugar, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Water Bread

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a mixing bowl, combine butter, sugar, and salt.

  2. Add the boiling water and let it cool.

  3. Once cool, add the dissolved yeast cake.

  4. Gradually mix in enough flour to form a dough.

  5. Knead the dough and let it rise as you would for milk bread.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

What each ingredient does

Yeast cake
Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes it rise and become airy.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough structure and chew.
Butter
Adds fat that softens the crumb and gives a tender texture.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a little sweetness and browning.

The step that matters

Let the water cool before adding the yeast. Boiling water kills yeast cells, so the mixture must cool to a warm, not hot, temperature before the dissolved yeast cake is added. Otherwise the dough will fail to rise.

“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.

You might also like

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipesPotato BreadPotato Bread124 recipes