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Drink

Haro-bread Toast Water

A beverage made by boiling toasted hard bread in salted water, served hot or cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Bread and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,638 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Haro-bread Toast Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Toast the hard-bread in the oven until golden.

Boil and serve

  1. Add the toasted hard-bread to the boiling salted water.

  2. Boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture through gauze.

  4. Serve hot or cold, and flavor with sugar, condensed milk, or whisky 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.

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 + 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

Hard-bread
Toasting browns the bread, giving the water its roasted, toasty flavor.

The step that matters

Toast the hard-bread until golden. Browning produces the roasted flavor of the drink. Pale bread tastes flat, while over-browned bread turns bitter because scorched sugars and starches taste harsh.

“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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