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Bread

Wheat Bread

A yeast‑leavened wheat bread made with warm flour, milk, yeast, salt, sugar, shortening, and flour for kneading.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Wheat Bread

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 ↓

Wheat Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the sponge

  1. Combine warm flour, scalded milk, and dissolved yeast in a large bowl.

  2. Stir together and let the mixture rise overnight.

Knead and shape

  1. In the morning, add salt, sugar, shortening, and enough flour to knead.

  2. Knead the dough until smooth and let it rise again.

  3. Divide the dough into two pans and let them rise until doubled in size.

Bake

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden brown.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 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).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the bread its structure and chewy crumb.
Yeast
Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes it rise.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness, and helps the crust brown.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and browning in the crust.
Shortening
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture.

The step that matters

Letting the dough rise until doubled. Yeast gas must be trapped by a well-developed gluten network. Under-proofed dough bakes dense, while over-proofed dough collapses and loses structure.

“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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