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Bread

To Make Leaven Bread

A leavened bread made by mixing leftover dough with flour, water or milk, letting rise overnight, then baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

To Make Leaven Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Take a lump of dough from your last baking and cover it with flour in a wooden vessel.

  2. Mix the dough with a peck of flour and warm liquor.

  3. Cover the mixture with a linen cloth and a blanket, and keep it in a warm place overnight.

Make the bread

  1. In the morning, mix the risen dough with 2-3 bushels of flour and 1 pound of salt.

  2. Knead the dough well and shape it into loaves.

  3. Bake the loaves in the oven as directed.

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

Dough from your last baking
Acts as a natural starter, bringing live leavening culture to raise the new dough.
Flour
Provides the structure and bulk that the gluten network builds on as the dough is kneaded.
Warm liquor (water or milk)
Hydrates the flour so gluten can form and lets the starter ferment.
Coarse sea salt
Controls fermentation speed and adds flavor to the loaves.

The step that matters

Overnight rise in a warm place. The starter needs warmth and time to ferment and raise the dough. Too cold and it rises slowly or not at all; the cloth and blanket help hold the heat in.

“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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