Skip to main content
Bread

Entire Wheat Bread

A loaf of bread made with whole wheat flour, scalded milk, yeast, sugar or yeast cake, molasses, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and wheat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Entire Wheat Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Add sweetening and salt to the scalded milk.

  2. Cool the mixture.

  3. When lukewarm, add the dissolved yeast cake and flour.

  4. Beat the dough well.

  5. Cover the mixture and let it rise until it doubles in bulk.

  6. Beat the dough again.

Shape and bake

  1. Turn the dough into greased bread pans, filling them halfway.

  2. Let the dough rise again, but it should not quite double in bulk during the last rise.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden brown.

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. Milk + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Milk and flour 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

Yeast cake
Ferments the dough so it rises and becomes light and airy.
Coarse whole wheat flour
Provides the main structure of the loaf, with more fiber and a denser crumb than white flour.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, a dark color, and moisture, and feeds the yeast.
Scalded milk
Adds moisture and softness to the crumb and richness to the flavor.

The step that matters

Last rise in the pans. Letting the dough rise only until it is just short of doubled leaves room for oven spring. If it over-proves, the gluten weakens and the loaf can collapse or turn coarse.

“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.

More whole wheat bread recipes

Unfermented 3 See all 125 →

You might also like

Wheat BreadWheat Bread65 recipesBarley Wheat BreadBarley Wheat Bread6 recipesCornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipes