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Bread

Buttermilk Bread

A yeasted bread made with buttermilk, sugar, salt, yeast, flour, baking soda, lard, and a sponge.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Buttermilk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,721 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Buttermilk Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. In a bowl, combine 2½ cups buttermilk, 1 tablespoon sugar, and 2 teaspoons salt.

  2. Scald ½ pint of sifted flour with the buttermilk mixture.

  3. Dissolve the yeast in tepid water and add it to the batter.

  4. Beat thoroughly and let it stand overnight in a warm place.

  5. In the morning, it should be light and bubbly.

Knead and rise

  1. In a large bowl, mix 6 pints of flour, 1 teaspoon salt, ½ teaspoon baking soda, and 1 tablespoon lard.

  2. Add this mixture to the sponge and knead for 15 minutes.

  3. Set the dough to rise in a warm place, covered to exclude air.

Shape and bake

  1. When light, mold into loaves and let rise again.

  2. Bake carefully as if they were loaves of cake.

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. Buttermilk + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Buttermilk + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Buttermilk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda and adds tenderness and a tangy flavor to the crumb.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide as it ferments the sugars, making the dough rise and become light.
Flour
Its proteins form gluten during kneading, giving the dough structure to hold the rising gas.
Lard
Adds fat that softens the crumb and makes the texture more tender.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic buttermilk to release gas, adding extra lift.

The step that matters

Overnight sponge. The batter must stand long enough in a warm place for the yeast to ferment and become light and bubbly. Under-fermented sponge gives a dense loaf with weak rise.

“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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