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Bread

Unfermented Bread

A quick, unfermented bread made with flour, baking soda, cream of tartar, cold water, and salt, baked at 400°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and wheat work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 681 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Unfermented Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C) and heat the gem pans.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour, cream of tartar, and baking soda together.

  2. Add the cold water and salt, then beat the batter rapidly to incorporate air.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into the hot gem pans.

  2. Immediately place the pans in the oven and bake until golden.

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. Cream + wheattop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together681 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream of tartar
Reacts with baking soda to produce carbon dioxide, lifting the batter without yeast.
Baking soda
Provides the alkali that reacts with the cream of tartar, creating gas for rise.
Graham or wheat flour
Provides the structure that sets as the bread bakes.
Very cold water
Keeps the batter cool so the leavening reaction is controlled until it reaches the oven.

The step that matters

Bake immediately after dropping the batter. The cream of tartar and baking soda start producing gas as soon as they are wet and mixed. Delaying the move to the hot oven lets much of that gas escape, so the breads may come out flat and 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.

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