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Bread, Made with Yeast

A yeast‑leavened loaf made by mixing flour, yeast, water or milk, salt, and baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Bread, Made with Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. In a trough, mix yeast with warm water or milk.

  2. Make a hole in the middle of the flour, pour the yeast mixture into it, and mix lightly into a batter.

  3. Strew a handful of flour over the batter and let the remaining flour lie around it to set the sponge overnight.

Make and rise the dough

  1. The next morning, add warm water or milk and salt to the sponge.

  2. Work the mixture into a stiff dough and knead thoroughly.

  3. Let the dough rise for 2 to 3 hours.

Bake

  1. Mould the dough into loaves and bake in a well-heated oven.

  2. A 5‑pound loaf requires 2.5 hours to bake; adjust time for smaller loaves.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Forms the main structure of the dough as its proteins develop into gluten when kneaded.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the dough, producing gas that makes the bread rise.
Warm water or milk
Hydrates the flour so gluten can form and keeps the dough moist and workable.

The step that matters

Knead the stiff dough thoroughly. Kneading develops gluten, the elastic network that traps the yeast's gas. 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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