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Bread

Rye Bread

A loaf of rye bread made with boiled potatoes, wheat flour, rye flour, yeast, and shortening.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 ↓

Rye Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. Mash the boiled potatoes finely.

  2. Add boiling potato water until the mixture equals 1 pint.

  3. Stir in wheat flour to make a thin batter.

  4. When cool, add the dissolved Yeast Foam.

  5. Let the mixture stand until night to rise.

Mix and bake

  1. In the morning, add warm water, salt, sugar, and shortening.

  2. Mix in rye flour until the dough is hard.

  3. Knead into 2 loaves and let rise.

  4. Bake for 1 hour.

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. Wheat + ryetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Potato + wheattop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together235 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Flour + ryetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,320 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Potato + ryetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together75 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rye flour
Forms the bulk of the dough structure, giving the loaf its dense, hearty crumb.
Wheat flour
Makes the thin batter with gluten that traps gas from the yeast during the overnight rise.
Yeast foam
Ferments the batter, producing gas that leavens the loaves.
Boiled potatoes
Add starch and moisture to the batter, helping the bread stay soft and moist.
Shortening
Adds fat, which tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand until night to rise. The long overnight fermentation lets the yeast develop flavor and leavening power before the rye flour is added. Rye has little gluten, so the batter must be well risen and active to give the loaves enough lift.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (wheat, flour, sugar, egg, rye):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wheat, flour, sugar, egg, rye. 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.

More rye bread recipes

Torte 7Indian 6Molasses 5Sourdough 4Graham 3Steamed 3 See all 103 →

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