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Bread

Milk Bread

A soft bread made with milk, butter, sugar, salt, water, yeast, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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

Make the dough

  1. Scald the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Add the butter, sugar, coarse sea salt, and water to the milk.

  3. Dissolve the yeast cake in the lukewarm water and add it to the milk mixture.

  4. Gradually add flour until a kneadable dough forms.

  5. Knead the dough and let it rise for 3 hours.

Shape and bake

  1. Punch down the dough, let it rise again, and then bake.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour 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

Milk
Adds richness and softness to the crumb and helps browning.
Butter
Adds fat, which tenderises the crumb and softens the texture.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and browning.
Yeast cake
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become airy.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough structure.

The step that matters

Gradually add flour until a kneadable dough forms. Adding too much flour at once or too much overall makes the dough stiff and dense, limiting rise. Adding it gradually lets you stop when the dough is soft and elastic.

“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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