Skip to main content
Drink

Toast Water

A beverage made by steeping toasted bread slices in boiling water, then sweetened and served cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Toast Water

Why it works: Bread and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,638 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Toast Water

Ingredients

Directions

Make the toast water

  1. Brown the slices of bread without burning them.

  2. Pour enough boiling water over the bread to cover it.

  3. Let the mixture steep until it cools, keeping it covered.

Strain and serve

  1. Strain off the water and sweeten to taste.

  2. Add a piece of ice before serving.

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. Bread + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Slices of bread
Toasting browns the bread, adding roasted, toasty flavor and color to the water.
Boiling water
Hot water extracts flavor and color from the toasted bread as it steeps.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the mild, toasty flavor of the water.

The step that matters

Brown the bread without burning it. Browning builds roasted flavor through Maillard reactions and caramelization. Once bread goes past golden into black, those compounds turn bitter and acrid, and that bitterness passes into the water as it steeps.

“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.

You might also like

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes