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Bread

Pure and Cheap Bread

A quick whole wheat loaf made with baking powder, salt, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,373 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Pure and Cheap Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix the baking powder, salt, and 3 cups of flour together.

  2. Pour the water over the flour mixture and stir well.

  3. Add the remaining flour gradually, kneading until the dough is smooth and not sticky.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough into loaves and place them on floured baking tins.

  2. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C) and bake the loaves for 15 minutes.

  3. Open the oven ventilator to release steam and reduce heat, baking for an additional 45 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.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Whole wheat flour
Provides the structure of the loaf and its wheaty flavour through gluten and bran.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, helping the loaves rise and become light.
Water
Hydrates the flour so gluten can form and the dough becomes workable.

The step that matters

Opening the oven ventilator. Venting releases steam built up during the first bake and lowers the heat, so the loaves finish cooking through without over-browning on the outside.

“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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