Name: Toast Water
Ingredients: stale bread crusts; boiling water; sugar to taste

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

stale bread crusts
boiling water
sugar to taste

Directions

Toast the crusts of stale bread.
Pour enough boiling water over the toasted bread to cover it.
Cover the dish tightly and let it sit until cold.
Strain the mixture and sweeten to taste.

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.

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

Stale bread crusts: Toasting browns the crusts, adding roasted aroma and flavor to the water.
Boiling water: Extracts flavor and color from the toasted bread 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.