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Milk Bread

Milk Bread is a soft loaf made with flour, sugar, salt, boiling water, butter, milk, yeast, and warm water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Milk Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the liquid

  1. In a separate bowl, stir the butter into the boiling water.

  2. Add the milk to the boiling water and remove from heat.

  3. When the mixture is slightly warmer than body temperature, dissolve the yeast in the warm water and add it to the milk mixture.

Make and knead the dough

  1. Sift the flour, sugar, and salt together in a large bowl.

  2. Make a well in the sifted flour, pour in the liquid mixture, and stir quickly with a wooden spoon to form a soft dough.

  3. Flour your hands, shape the dough into a ball, and knead for ten minutes.

  4. Cover the dough and let it rise until it doubles in size.

Shape and bake

  1. After rising, knead the dough for five more minutes, shape it into loaves, and let them rise again until light.

  2. Bake the loaves in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Forms the gluten network that gives the soft dough its structure and chew.
Milk
Adds richness, softness and browning from milk sugars and proteins to the crumb and crust.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide as it ferments, making the dough rise and become light.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and gives a softer texture.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and helps the crust brown during baking.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast at the right temperature. The yeast is added only when the liquid is slightly warmer than body temperature. Water that is too hot kills yeast, while cooler liquid slows fermentation, so the dough may fail to rise.

“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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