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Bread

White Bread

A simple yeast bread made with flour, sugar, salt, lard, potato yeast, milk, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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White Bread

Why it works: Potato and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,611 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

White Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Add a quantity of flour to a bread pan.

  2. Add the sugar, salt, lard, and potato yeast to the center of the flour.

  3. Mix the lard, yeast, sugar, and salt together with a spoon.

Make the dough

  1. Pour the boiling water over the milk.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

  3. Add the cooled mixture to the flour.

  4. Mix until the dough is stiff enough to mold.

Rise and shape

  1. Let the dough rise in a warm place for at least 30 minutes.

  2. Cut and mold the dough into a loaf.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Walnut + potatotop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together342 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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.
Potato yeast
Produces carbon dioxide gas that makes the dough rise.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, giving a softer crumb.
Lard
Adds fat, which tenderizes the crumb and softens texture.
White sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a little sweetness and browning.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the boiling water and milk must cool before they are added to the yeast and flour. If the mixture is still hot, the dough will not rise properly.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, potato, milk):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Milletfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, potato, milk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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