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Bread

White Bread

A quick white bread made with flour, yeast, lard or butter, water, salt, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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White Bread

Why it works: Flour and butter 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 ↓

White Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Dissolve yeast and sugar in lukewarm water.

  2. Add melted lard or butter and half the flour; beat until smooth.

  3. Mix in salt and enough remaining flour to form a manageable dough.

  4. Knead until smooth and elastic.

  5. Place in a greased bowl, cover, and let rise in a warm place for about 1.5 hours.

Shape and bake

  1. Mould into loaves and place in greased bread pans, filling them half full.

  2. Cover and let rise for 1 hour or until doubled in size.

  3. Bake for 45 to 60 minutes.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter 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 and chew.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars and produces gas that makes the dough rise.
Lard or butter
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and softens the texture.
Water
Hydrates the flour so gluten forms and dissolves the yeast.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and helps the crust brown during baking.

The step that matters

Knead until smooth and elastic. Kneading aligns gluten strands so the dough can trap the gas yeast produces. Under-kneaded dough rises poorly and bakes up dense and crumbly.

“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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