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Bread

Delicious White Bread

A basic white bread made with flour, sugar, lard, yeast, milk, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk 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 ↓

Delicious White Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. In a large bowl, make a hole in 3 quarts of sifted flour.

  2. Add 3 heaping teaspoons of sugar, ½ cup of lard, and 2 teaspoons of salt.

  3. In a separate container, mix 1½ pints of milk with 1½ pints of hot water.

  4. Dissolve 1 cake of compressed yeast in 1 cup of lukewarm water and pour it into the flour.

  5. Gradually add the milk mixture until fully incorporated.

  6. Stir until the dough loses its stickiness, adding more flour if necessary.

  7. Knead the dough thoroughly until it becomes soft and velvety, using minimal flour.

  8. Cover the bowl with a cloth and let it rise in a warm place overnight.

Shape and bake

  1. In the morning, knead the dough down and turn it out onto a bread board.

  2. Divide the dough into loaves and place them in a greased pan.

  3. Cover and let rise again in a warm place until light.

  4. Prick each loaf with a fork to allow gas to escape.

  5. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C) and bake until golden.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Flour and milk 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 gluten network that gives the bread its structure and chew.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, and helps browning in the crust.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a little sweetness and crust browning.

The step that matters

Kneading until soft and velvety. Kneading develops the gluten network that traps the yeast gas. Adding too much flour makes the dough stiff and dense, so the loaves rise less and bake up heavy.

“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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