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Bread

Water Bread

Water Bread is a yeast bread made with flour, salt, butter, water, and yeast cake, baked after two rises.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Water Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Mix together 1 quart of bread flour and 1 teaspoon of salt.

  2. Rub in 1 teaspoon of butter until the mixture resembles fine meal.

  3. Soak a whole yeast cake in 1 cup of lukewarm water.

  4. Combine the soaked yeast with the dry mixture.

  5. Add enough additional flour to make a stiff dough for kneading.

  6. Knead the dough well, then place it in a bowl and cover it.

Rise and shape

  1. Let it rise for 3 hours.

  2. Cut down the risen dough, shape it into loaves, and place in buttered pans.

Bake

  1. Let the loaves rise again, then bake for about 50 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Bread + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Bread flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure and chew.
Yeast cake (in the method)
Produces gas as it ferments, causing the dough to rise and become airy.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture.
Water
Hydrates the flour so gluten can form and activates the yeast.

The step that matters

Knead the dough well. Kneading aligns and develops gluten strands, which trap the gas from fermentation. Under-kneaded dough rises poorly and bakes up dense and crumbly.

“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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