Name: Rye Bread
Ingredients: 1 tablespoon sugar; 1 tablespoon molasses; ½ teaspoon baking soda; 1 part winter wheat flour; 2 parts rye flour; Warm water (as needed); Caraway seeds or extract (to taste)

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

Prepare yeast as in bread No. 2.
Mix sugar, molasses, and baking soda into the yeast.
Combine winter wheat and rye flour in a bowl.
Add enough warm water to form a stiff dough.
Shape the dough into long, slim loaves.
Gash the tops of the loaves slightly before baking.
Flavor with caraway seeds or extract if desired.

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.

Wheat + ryetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together404 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Rye + carawaytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together87 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Flour + carawaytop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,435 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + ryetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,320 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Wheat + carawaytop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together44 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Swap the caraway

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

Cinnamonfits better
Carawaythe original
Nutmegfits less well
Gingerfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, molasses, wheat, flour, rye. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.