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Bread

Eye Bread

A rye bread with caraway seeds, sugar, and lard baked at 400°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Eye Bread

Why it works: Rye and caraway share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 87 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Eye 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.

Make the dough

  1. Set a sponge using white flour.

  2. Once the sponge is ready, mix in an equal amount of rye flour to the white flour used.

  3. Add caraway seeds to taste and mix into a stiff dough, dusting with white flour.

Shape and proof

  1. Mold into Vienna-shaped loaves weighing 18 ounces each.

  2. Place in a proof box until ready.

Bake

  1. Make three shallow oblique cuts on top of each loaf to prevent tearing.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for 25 to 30 minutes.

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. Rye + carawaytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together87 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + ryetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,320 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Caraway + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

White flour
Builds the gluten structure that holds the loaf together and gives it a lighter crumb.
Rye flour
Adds flavour and a denser, moister crumb, since it forms less gluten than wheat flour.
Caraway seeds
Provide the characteristic aromatic flavour of this bread.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and softens the texture.

The step that matters

Make three shallow oblique cuts on top of each loaf. Cuts give the loaf a controlled place to expand in the oven. Without them, steam builds up unevenly and the crust can split or tear randomly.

Swap the caraway

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

  1. Carawaythe original
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Nutmegfits less well
  4. Jalapenofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, rye, sugar. 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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