Skip to main content
Bread

Graham Bread

A loaf made from Graham flour, yeast, sugar, salt, and water, baked at 300°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Graham Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the bran and sponge

  1. Sift the Graham flour thoroughly and scrape off the top where there is most bran.

  2. Put the bran in a basin and scald it. Mix in enough cold water to make the bran lukewarm.

  3. Add flour to make a stiff batter. Mix in the yeast.

Rise and shape

  1. Set the mixture in a warm place to rise well.

  2. Once risen, add sugar, salt, and enough flour to make a stiff dough. Cover and let it rise again until light.

  3. Butter quart pans well. Mold the bread with minimal flour and place in the pans. Let the loaves rise for 10 minutes.

Bake

  1. Bake at 300°F (150°C) for 1.5 hours.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Graham flour
Provides the main structure and the bran-flecked, hearty texture of the loaf.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and browning to the crust.
Bran
Adds fiber-rich texture and coarseness, and absorbs water in the batter.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise until light. Yeast needs warmth and time to build gas in the stiff dough. Rising fully gives the loaf its lightness; under-proofed dough bakes dense.

“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.

More graham bread recipes

Steamed 18Quick 13 See all 389 →

You might also like

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesNut BreadNut Bread109 recipesWheat BreadWheat Bread65 recipes