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Bread

Household White Bread

A simple white bread made with water, milk, butter, sugar, salt, yeast, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Household White Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liquids

  1. Scald the milk and water, then pour the hot liquid over the butter, sugar, and salt.

  2. Dissolve the yeast in ½ cup lukewarm water.

  3. Allow the milk and water mixture to cool before combining with the yeast.

Mix, shape and bake

  1. Mix thoroughly but do not overwork the dough.

  2. Shape into small loaves and bake well.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour 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

Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the bread its structure.
Yeast
Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes it rise.
Milk
Adds richness, softness and some browning from its milk sugars.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and food for the yeast, helping fermentation.
Butter or lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture.

The step that matters

Cooling the milk and water before adding yeast. Yeast is killed by heat, so liquid that is still hot can stop the dough from rising. The mixture should be cooled before it meets the yeast, so the yeast stays alive and can ferment the dough properly.

“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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