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Bread

Bread From Milk Yeast

Bread made using a yeast mixture from milk and boiling water, combined with cornmeal and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Bread From Milk Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Mix ½ cup cornmeal with enough boiling hot sweet milk to make a batter-like consistency.

  2. Keep the mixture warm overnight.

Make the batter

  1. Pour 1 pint of boiling water into a pitcher.

  2. Add 1 teaspoon baking soda and 1 teaspoon coarse sea salt.

  3. Add flour to make a stiff batter.

  4. Mix in the cornmeal mixture.

  5. Place the pitcher in warm water.

  6. Cover with a towel.

  7. Keep warm until the yeast rises.

Shape and bake

  1. Pour the yeast into a bread pan.

  2. Add 1½ pints of warm water or a mix of water and milk.

  3. Add enough flour to knead into loaves.

  4. Knead slightly harder than for biscuits.

  5. Bake as soon as it rises to the top of the pan.

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 + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Builds the gluten network that gives the loaves their structure and chew.
Cornmeal
Adds body and a coarser texture to the batter and the finished crumb.
Warm water or water and milk
Hydrates the flour so gluten can form and keeps the dough workable.

The step that matters

Bake as soon as it rises to the top of the pan. Yeast keeps producing gas as the dough rises. If it rises too long, the gas-filled structure weakens and can collapse, leaving a dense or sunken loaf.

“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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