Skip to main content
Bread

Ice

A simple yeast bread made with egg, yeast cake, water, and flour, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Ice

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the dough

  1. Beat the egg until light.

  2. Dissolve the yeast cake in lukewarm water.

  3. Combine the egg and yeast mixture with flour on a board.

Knead and rise

  1. Knead the dough thoroughly.

  2. Let the dough rise until light.

  3. Cut down the dough and let it rise again.

  4. Shape the dough and let it rise until it doubles in bulk.

Bake

  1. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for about 30 minutes.

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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Egg
Adds structure and richness, and its proteins help bind the dough together.
Yeast cake
Produces carbon dioxide gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Flour
Its proteins form gluten, the stretchy network that traps the gas and holds the dough's shape.

The step that matters

Knead the dough thoroughly. Kneading aligns and develops the gluten proteins in the flour into a stretchy network. This network traps the gas from the yeast so the dough rises well. Under-kneaded dough rises poorly and bakes up dense.

“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.

More yeast bread recipes

Milk 27Compressed 23German 21Potato 21No 20Hop 8 See all 83 →

You might also like

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipesPotato BreadPotato Bread124 recipes