Name: Rye and Wheat Flour, Half and Half, Makes Excellent House- Hold Bread
Ingredients: 2 quarts warm water; German yeast; flour (rye and wheat, half and half); coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')

Why it works: Rye and wheat match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 404 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Rye and Wheat Flour, Half and Half, Makes Excellent House- Hold Bread

Ingredients

2 quarts warm water
German yeast
flour (rye and wheat, half and half)
coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')

Directions

Prepare the dough

Let the water stand until warm, then add a little German yeast for a first quickening.
Put the yeast into half or more of the flour and stir well.
Add 2 quarts of warm water and let it stand to rise.

Shape and bake

Knead with the rest of the flour and put into tins.
Let it stand to rise again, 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.

Rye + wheattop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together404 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Flour + ryetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,320 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + wheattop 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

German yeast: Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes the bread rise.
Flour (rye and wheat, half and half): Forms the gluten network and structure that holds the loaf together.

“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.