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Force Bread

A sun-dried bread made from whole wheat, barley, rye, nuts, dried apples, and apple juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and rye 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 ↓

Force Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grind the whole wheat, pearl barley, and rye in a mill.

  2. Mix in the raw peanuts, pine nuts or Brazil nuts, and dried apples.

  3. Moisten the mixture with unfermented apple juice until combined.

  4. Form the mixture into small cakes.

Dry and serve

  1. Expose the cakes to the hot sun for 30 minutes.

  2. Eat slowly and chew thoroughly.

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. Wheat + ryetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Wheat + barleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together185 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  3. Barley + ryetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together66 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Wheat + peanuttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together151 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Wheat + pinetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together46 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Whole wheat
Provides the main grain body and starch that holds the cakes together.
Dried apples
Adds sweetness and chewy moisture that softens the texture.
Raw peanuts
Adds fat and richness along with a firm, crunchy bite.
Unfermented apple juice
Moistens the dry grains so they bind into shapeable cakes.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (wheat, barley, rye, peanut, pine):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wheat, barley, rye, peanut, pine. 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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