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Drink

Toast Wat'er

A drink made by soaking toasted bread slices in water, optionally flavored with lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,445 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Toast Wat'er

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Toast the bread slices until dark brown, but do not burn them.

  2. Place the toast in a deep bowl and pour the water over it.

  3. For added flavor, soak a piece of lemon peel with the bread.

Steep and strain

  1. Let it stand for 2 to 3 hours.

  2. Pour the water off the bread.

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 + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 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

Dark brown bread
Toasted bread gives the water its color and a mild roasted, toasty flavor.
Water
Carries the flavor of the toast out of the bread during steeping.

The step that matters

Toast the bread until dark brown without burning it. Toasting browns the starches and sugars in the bread, which creates the roasted flavor and color. Burnt bread adds bitter, acrid notes that carry into the water and spoil 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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