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Bread

Indian Brown Bread

A yeast-leavened bread made with boiling water, salt, cornmeal, molasses, and yeast, steamed and optionally baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Molasses and coffee work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 640 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Indian Brown Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Combine boiling water and salt in a pot.

  2. Thicken with cornmeal until very stiff.

  3. Cook well.

  4. Stir in molasses until cool.

  5. Add yeast and mix well.

  6. Mold the dough and place it in a warm area to rise.

Steam and dry

  1. Transfer to a pan suitable for steaming and let it rise again.

  2. Steam for 2 hours.

  3. Place in a 300°F (150°C) oven to dry.

  4. Optionally bake in greased bread pans to prevent a hard crust.

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. Molasses + coffeetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together640 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Cornmeal
Thickens the boiling water into a stiff dough that holds its shape.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark color and moisture to the dough.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise before and after shaping.

The step that matters

Stir in molasses until cool. Adding molasses to dough that is still very hot can damage the yeast, which is killed at high temperatures. Letting the mixture cool first keeps the yeast alive so the bread can 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.

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