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Bread with Buttermilk

A yeasted bread made with sweet buttermilk and flour, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Buttermilk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,721 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Bread with Buttermilk

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. Bring the buttermilk to a boil the evening before baking.

  2. Pour the hot buttermilk into a crock with 1 small cup of flour.

  3. Let the mixture cool.

  4. Add yeast and enough flour to make a thick batter.

Make and bake the bread

  1. In the morning, sift flour into a bread pan and pour the sponge in the center.

  2. Stir in some of the flour and let it stand until after breakfast.

  3. Mix and knead the dough for about 30 minutes.

  4. When the dough is light, shape it into loaves, kneading as little as possible.

  5. Bake 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. Buttermilk + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Buttermilk
Provides acidity and moisture, and its acid works with yeast to build the sponge's flavor.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Flour
Forms gluten with kneading, giving the dough structure to hold its rise.

The step that matters

Shape the dough with minimal kneading. Once the dough is light, extra kneading knocks out the gas bubbles and toughens the gluten, so the loaves can end up dense instead of airy.

“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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