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Drink

Crust Coffee

Crust Coffee is a beverage made by boiling crusted brown bread in water, then served with milk or cream and sweetener.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Crust Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Dry pieces of brown bread in a slow oven until hard.

  2. Place the dried bread in an earthen teapot.

Brew and serve

  1. Pour boiling water over the bread and boil for 15 minutes.

  2. Serve with milk or cream and sweeten to taste.

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 + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Brown bread
Slow drying and roasting browns its starches, giving the brew a toasty, nutty flavour and colour.
Boiling water
Extracts flavour, colour and body from the roasted bread particles into the liquid.
Milk or cream
Adds fat and milk proteins that soften the roasted bitterness and give a rounder mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Drying the bread in a slow oven until hard. Slow, gentle heat removes moisture and browns the bread evenly through its sugars and starches. Too hot an oven scorches the outside while the inside stays pale, leaving a harsh, burnt taste in the brew.

“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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