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Bread

Easy Bread

A simple yeast bread made with flour, yeast, sugar, salt, warm liquid, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Easy Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the dough

  1. Mix the flour, yeast, sugar, salt, and warm water or milk in a large bowl until well combined.

  2. Set aside a little flour for kneading.

  3. Knead the dough on a floured surface for 30 minutes.

  4. Place the kneaded dough back in the bowl.

  5. Grease the surface with melted lard.

  6. Cover and let it rise for 8 to 9 hours.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough into loaves.

  2. Let the loaves rise in a warm place for 1 hour.

  3. Bake the loaves in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 1 hour.

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).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide gas as it ferments, making the dough rise.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and helps the crust brown during baking.
Warm water or milk
Hydrates the flour so gluten can form and activates the yeast.
Salt
Controls yeast activity and strengthens the dough's flavor and texture.

The step that matters

Knead the dough on a floured surface for 30 minutes. Kneading aligns and stretches gluten strands, giving the dough elasticity to trap the gas from the yeast. Too little kneading leaves a dense loaf, while too much flour on the surface can make the dough stiff.

“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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