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Bread

Buttermilk Bread

A quick bread made with flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, sugar, and buttermilk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and buttermilk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,721 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Buttermilk Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Let the buttermilk stand until quite cold.

  2. In a basin, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and sugar, ensuring no lumps of soda remain.

Make the dough

  1. Mix in the buttermilk to form a firm dough.

  2. Shape the dough into loaves or rolls.

Bake

  1. Bake immediately.

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 + buttermilktop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + buttermilktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the loaves together as they set.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in buttermilk to release gas that lifts the dough.
Buttermilk
Adds moisture and acidity that activates the baking soda and tenderizes the crumb.
Baking powder
Releases additional gas during baking to help the bread rise.
Sugar
Adds a little sweetness and helps the crust brown.

The step that matters

Bake immediately. Baking soda and buttermilk begin reacting as soon as they are wet, releasing gas. If the dough waits before baking, some of that lift is lost, so the loaves may be denser.

“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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