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Bread

Toast Crumbs

Toast crumbs are toasted bread pieces made by baking buttered stale bread until light brown.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Toast Crumbs

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Cut the stale bread into moderately thick slices.

  2. Spread the slices with butter.

  3. Cut each slice into small dice.

  4. Place the diced bread in a dripping pan.

Toast

  1. Put the pan in a high oven (400°F / 200°C).

  2. Watch and shake the pan to turn the bread until it is light 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.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Dry, porous structure that toasts into crisp, crunchy crumbs.
Butter
Adds fat that promotes even browning and a rich flavor.

The step that matters

Shaking the pan until light brown. Bread pieces brown quickly at high heat, so turning them regularly keeps them from scorching on one side while the rest stays pale. Stopping at light brown keeps the crumbs crisp and not bitter.

“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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