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Drink

Toast Water

A beverage made by steeping stale toast in boiling water, optionally flavored with wine and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Toast Water

Why it works: Bread and wine work together. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 956 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity. The science ↓

Toast Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Toast the stale bread slices until dark brown, but do not burn.

  2. Place the toasted bread in a pitcher.

  3. Pour the boiling water over the bread.

Chill and serve

  1. Cover the pitcher and let it stand on ice until cold.

  2. Strain the mixture before serving.

  3. Add wine and sugar if desired.

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.

  1. Bread + winetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together956 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

  2. Wine + sugartop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. 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
Toasted bread gives the water its brown color and a mild toasty flavor.
Boiling water
Hot water draws flavor and color out of the toasted bread into the liquid.

The step that matters

Toast the bread until dark brown without burning. Toasting browns the bread through Maillard reactions and caramelization, which creates the flavor and color of the drink. Burnt bits add bitter, acrid notes that carry into the water.

“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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