Name: Rolled Oats Bread
Ingredients: 2 cups rolled oats; 2 cups boiling water; 2 tablespoons salt; 2 tablespoons lard; ½ cup brown sugar or molasses; 1 yeast cake, dissolved in ½ cup lukewarm water; About 4 cups bread flour

Why it works: Oats and bread work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 258 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Rolled Oats Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Pour boiling water over rolled oats; add salt, lard, and molasses.
Cool mixture to lukewarm; add dissolved yeast.
Add flour to make a sponge and set aside to rise.
Finish the dough as you would for White Bread.

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.

Oats + breadtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together258 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Oats + flourtop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,169 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Oats + sugartop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,548 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Bread + flourtop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together10,383 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Bread and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,383 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

Brown Bread461 recipes

White Bread80 recipes

Bread Omelette60 recipes

Oatmeal Bread51 recipes

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Rolled Oats Bread