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Bread

Compressed Yeast Bread No. 1

A yeast bread made with compressed yeast, water, milk, flour, salt, and fat, risen and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour 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 ↓

Compressed Yeast Bread No. 1

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Break the compressed yeast into small pieces in a cup and cover with cold water.

  2. In a bowl, combine ½ cup milk and ½ cup water to make 1 pint of liquid at 75°F (24°C).

  3. Add 2 teaspoons of coarse sea salt and stir in 1 cup of sifted flour.

  4. Stir the yeast and water mixture into the bowl, then add another cup of flour and beat well.

  5. Continue adding flour while kneading with a spoon until the dough is nearly stiff.

  6. Flour your hands and the board, then knead the dough until it no longer sticks.

  7. Grease the bowl and the top of the dough with nice-flavored fat.

Rise and shape

  1. Cover the bowl with a white cloth and let it rise at room temperature (75°F) for 3 hours or until doubled in size.

  2. Knead the dough again, mold it into loaves, and place in greased pans.

Bake

  1. Grease the tops of the loaves, let them rise for 1 hour until doubled, and then bake.

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour 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 loaves their structure and chew.
Compressed yeast
Produces carbon dioxide that makes the dough rise and become light.
Milk
Adds softness and tenderness, and helps the crust brown.

The step that matters

Adding the flour gradually while kneading. Flour should be added little by little until the dough is nearly stiff but still workable. Too much flour makes the dough dense and dry, and the gluten develops better when the dough is kneaded until it no longer sticks.

“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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