Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓
Yeast 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
Sift the flour into a bread pan and reserve 1 cup for kneading.
Add salt, sugar, yeast, and blood-warm water to the flour.
Mix well with a strong spoon.
Knead and rise
Turn the dough onto a floured board and knead for 20 to 30 minutes.
Rub softened lard over the dough, cover tightly, and let rise in a warm place for 8 to 9 hours.
In the morning, shape the dough into loaves or rolls.
Bake and store
Let loaves rise for 1 hour and rolls for 1.5 hours in a warm place.
Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Test the oven by browning a teaspoon of flour in 1 minute.
Bake loaves for 45 to 60 minutes and rolls for 30 minutes.
French rolls will bake in 15 minutes.
Remove the bread from the pans and let cool against something until cool.
Store in a clean, dry container.
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.
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Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
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 as the dough is kneaded.
- Yeast
- Produces carbon dioxide gas that makes the dough rise and become airy.
- Sugar
- Feeds the yeast and helps the crust brown during baking.
- Lard
- Adds fat that softens the crumb and gives a more tender texture.
The step that matters
Kneading the dough for 20 to 30 minutes. Kneading aligns and stretches the gluten proteins in the flour. Under-kneaded dough has weak structure and may not hold the gas the yeast produces, so loaves can rise poorly or collapse.
“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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