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Bread

Bread From Milk Yeast

A bread made by fermenting cornmeal with milk yeast and baking it.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour 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

Prepare the cornmeal

  1. Pour enough boiling sweet milk over ½ cup cornmeal to make a batter-like thickness and keep it warm overnight.

Make the yeast

  1. Pour 1 pint of boiling water into a pitcher and add 1 teaspoon baking soda and 1 teaspoon salt.

  2. Let the mixture cool until it is warm but not scalding.

  3. Add enough flour to make a stiff batter, then mix in the cornmeal mixture.

  4. Place the pitcher in a kettle of warm water, cover with a towel, and keep it warm until the yeast rises to the top.

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, and enough flour to knead into loaves.

  3. Knead slightly harder than for biscuits.

  4. 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour 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

Cornmeal
Adds body and a coarse, slightly grainy texture to the batter.
Flour
Builds gluten structure when kneaded, giving the loaves their chewy crumb.
Warm milk or water
Hydrates the flour and dough, providing the moisture that makes the dough workable.

The step that matters

Bake as soon as it rises to the top of the pan. Yeast gives off gas that stretches the gluten network. If the dough rises too long, that network weakens and the loaf can collapse or turn coarse, so timing the bake matters.

“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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