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Bread

Unfermented, or Diet Bread

A quick, unfermented bread made with wheat meal, cream of tartar, baking soda, and crushed salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and cream work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 681 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Unfermented, or Diet Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the dough

  1. Mix the cream of tartar and baking soda with the flour, then sift everything through a sieve.

  2. Make a well in the center of the mixture and add the crushed salt.

  3. Combine all ingredients until a dough forms.

Bake

  1. Shape the dough into loaves and place them in a baking pan.

  2. Bake in the preheated oven until golden brown.

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. Wheat + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together681 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Wheat meal
Forms the main structure of the bread as the bulk of the dough.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the dough so it reacts with the baking soda to help the loaves rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the dough to produce carbon dioxide gas, which lifts the loaves.

The step that matters

Sifting and mixing the leavening evenly. Baking soda and cream of tartar must be spread evenly through the flour. Clumps of baking soda can leave bitter, yellow patches, and uneven acid causes uneven rising.

“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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