Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓
Yeast Bread
Ingredients
Directions
The book gives no oven temperature. The 100°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.
Prepare the dough
Sift the flour into a bread pan and set aside 1 cup for kneading.
Add salt, sugar, yeast, and blood-warm water (about 100°F in cold weather, 80°F in hot weather) to the flour. Beat well with a strong spoon until mixed.
Sprinkle flour on a board, turn the dough out, and knead for 20 to 30 minutes.
Rub softened lard over the dough, cover tightly, and set in a warm place to rise for 8 to 9 hours.
Shape and rise
In the morning, shape the dough into loaves or rolls.
Let loaves rise for 1 hour in a warm place (90°F to 100°F) or rolls for 1.5 hours.
Bake and cool
Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until browned, about 45 to 60 minutes for loaves and 30 minutes for rolls. For French rolls, bake for 15 minutes.
Remove bread from pans and let cool against something until cool, then store in a clean, dry box.
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.
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Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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 gluten network that gives the bread its structure and chew.
- Yeast
- Produces carbon dioxide during fermentation, which makes the dough rise.
- Lard
- Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens the crust.
- Sugar
- Feeds the yeast and aids browning of the crust.
The step that matters
Kneading the dough. Kneading develops the gluten network so the dough can trap the gas yeast produces. Too little kneading gives a dense loaf that rises poorly.
“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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