Name: Force Bread
Ingredients: ½ cup whole wheat flour; 1 teaspoon pearl barley; 1 teaspoon rye flour; 2 tablespoons raw peanuts; 1 tablespoon pine nuts or Brazil nuts; ½ cup dried apples; unfermented apple juice (as needed)

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 the dough

Grind the whole wheat, pearl barley, and rye in a mill.
Mix the ground grains with raw peanuts, pine nuts or Brazil nuts, and dried apples.
Moisten the mixture with unfermented apple juice until combined.
Form the mixture into small cakes.

Dry and serve

Expose the cakes to the hot sun for 30 minutes.
Eat slowly and chew thoroughly. Do not drink with this bread.

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.

Wheat + ryetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together404 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Wheat + barleytop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together185 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).
Barley + ryetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together66 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).
Wheat + peanuttop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together151 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).
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 flour: Provides the main structure and bulk of the bread.
Dried apples: Adds sweetness and moisture to the mixture.
Raw peanuts: Adds fat, crunch and a nutty flavour.
Unfermented apple juice: Moistens the flour so the mixture holds together.

Swap the apple

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

Avocadofits better
Raisinfits better
Limefits better
Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wheat, flour, 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.