Skip to main content
Bread

Wheat Bread

A simple wheat bread made with milk, water, sugar, salt, yeast, and flour.

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

Why it works: Milk and flour 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 ↓

Wheat Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. Warm the milk and water together.

  2. Add the sugar, salt, and yeast, then stir in enough flour to make a thin batter.

  3. Let the mixture stand until it becomes light.

Knead and shape

  1. Knead in flour until the dough no longer sticks.

  2. Let it rise again.

  3. Shape the dough into loaves.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and flour 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

What each ingredient does

Yeast
Ferments the batter, producing gas that makes the dough light and rise.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the bread its structure.
Milk
Adds moisture, softness, and a tender crumb to the dough.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and helps the crust brown lightly.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand until it becomes light. The yeast needs time to ferment and produce gas. Stopping early leaves a dense loaf, while the rise must be visible before kneading continues.

“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.

More wheat bread recipes

Whole 125Barley 5Unfermented Whole 3 See all 74 →

You might also like

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