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Bread

Water Bread

A simple bread made with boiling water, yeast, butter, salt, sugar, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Water Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liquid

  1. In a mixing bowl, combine butter, sugar, and salt.

  2. Pour in the boiling water and let it cool.

  3. Once cool, dissolve the yeast cake in the mixture.

Make and rise the dough

  1. Gradually add enough flour to form a dough.

  2. Knead the dough and let it rise as you would for milk bread.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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.
Yeast cake
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Boiling water
Hydrates the flour so it can form a dough, and gives moisture to the bread.
Butter
Adds fat that softens the crumb and adds richness.
Sugar
Adds mild sweetness and gives the yeast an easily used food source.

The step that matters

Let the water cool before adding the yeast. Boiling water kills yeast cells, so the liquid must cool before the yeast is dissolved in it. If it is still hot, the dough will not rise properly.

“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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