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Drink

Toast Water, or Crust Coffee

A beverage made by steeping toasted stale bread crusts in boiling water, sweetened and served cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,638 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Toast Water, or Crust Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Make the toast water

  1. Toast the stale crusts of bread until dark brown, being careful not to burn them.

  2. Place the browned crusts in a large pitcher and pour enough boiling water over them to cover.

  3. Cover the pitcher closely and let it stand until cold.

  4. Strain the mixture and sweeten to taste.

Serve

  1. Add a piece of ice to each glass before serving.

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 + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Stale crusts of bread
Toasting browns the crusts, adding toasty, caramelized flavor to the water.
Boiling water
Extracts the toasted flavor and color from the crusts into the liquid.

The step that matters

Toasting the crusts until dark brown. Browning develops the roasted, toasty flavor through the Maillard reaction and caramelization. Pale crusts give a weak flavor, while burnt crusts add bitter, acrid notes that carry into the drink.

“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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