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Bread

Quick Graham Bread

A quick bread made with sour milk, sugar, baking soda, and Graham flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Quick Graham Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Dissolve the baking soda in a little boiling water.

Mix the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine sour milk and sugar.

  2. Stir in the dissolved baking soda.

  3. Add enough Graham flour to make a stiff batter.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into greased pans.

  2. Bake immediately for 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.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda to produce gas that lightens the bread.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk, releasing carbon dioxide that makes the bread rise.
Graham flour
Provides the bulk and structure of the batter, along with its coarse bran texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown during baking.

The step that matters

Bake immediately after mixing. The baking soda and sour milk start releasing gas as soon as they combine. Waiting before baking lets much of that gas escape, so the bread may rise less and turn out denser.

“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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