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Bread

Buttermilk Bread

A quick bread made with flour, leavening, salt, sugar, and buttermilk, kneaded into loaves or rolls and baked immediately.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Let the buttermilk stand until sour but not rancid.

  2. In a basin, mix the flour with the carbonate of soda, baking powder, salt, and sugar, crushing out lumps.

  3. Add buttermilk to the flour mixture to form a firm dough.

Shape and bake

  1. Knead slightly, shape into loaves or rolls, and 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
Forms the structure of the dough, which holds the bread together as it bakes.
Buttermilk
Provides the liquid that forms the dough and its mild sourness.
Carbonate of soda
Reacts with the acid in sour buttermilk to produce gas that lightens the bread.
Baking powder
Adds extra leavening so the bread rises during baking.

The step that matters

Baking immediately after shaping. Once the soda and baking powder are mixed with the buttermilk, they begin releasing gas. Baking right away traps that gas in the dough so the bread rises well instead of going flat.

“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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