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 ↓
Whole 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 batter
Mix the milk and boiling water and let it cool to lukewarm.
Dissolve the yeast cake in the tepid water and add it to the milk mixture.
Stir in the salt and enough flour to make a batter, beating well for 15 minutes.
Let the batter rise until light, then add more flour to form a stiff dough.
Shape and bake
Mold the dough into loaves and let them rise until light.
Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 1 hour.
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.
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Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together78,219 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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
- Flour
- Forms the batter and then the stiff dough that gives the loaves their structure.
- Yeast cake
- Ferments the batter so the dough rises and becomes light.
- Milk
- Adds richness and softness to the crumb and helps browning.
The step that matters
Beating the batter for 15 minutes. Vigorous beating develops gluten in the flour, which gives the dough the elasticity to trap gas from the yeast and rise well.
“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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