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Bread

Quick White Bread

A simple white bread made with flour, salt, yeast, water, and milk, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Quick White 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. Dissolve the yeast in tepid water.

  2. In a large bowl, combine flour and salt.

  3. Add the dissolved yeast and enough milk to form a soft dough.

  4. Knead the dough until smooth.

Rise and shape

  1. Let the dough rise for about 1.5 hours.

  2. Shape the dough into loaves and let rise for an additional 10 minutes.

Bake

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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.
Compressed yeast
Ferments sugars and produces gas that makes the dough rise and become airy.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness to the dough and helps browning in the crust.

The step that matters

Letting the dough rise. Yeast needs time and warmth to produce enough gas to raise the dough. Rising too short leaves dense bread, while over-rising can weaken the gluten structure and collapse the loaves.

“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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