Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓
Yeast 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 the dough
Sift the flour into a bread pan and reserve 1 cup for kneading.
Add salt, sugar, yeast, and blood-warm water to the flour and mix well with a strong spoon.
Turn the dough onto a floured board and knead for 20 to 30 minutes.
Rub softened lard over the dough, cover it, and let it rise in a warm place for 8 to 9 hours.
Shape and rise
In the morning, shape the dough into loaves or rolls.
Let loaves rise for 1 hour and rolls for 1.5 hours in a warm place.
Bake and cool
Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Bake loaves for 45 to 60 minutes and rolls for 30 minutes, or French rolls for 15 minutes.
Remove the bread from the pans and let it cool on a table.
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.
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Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Flour
- Forms the gluten network that gives the bread its structure and chew.
- Yeast
- Produces gas as it ferments, which makes the dough rise and become airy.
- Lard
- Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture.
- Water
- Hydrates the flour so gluten can form and activates the yeast.
The step that matters
Kneading the dough. Kneading develops the gluten network that traps the gas from the yeast. Under-kneaded dough rises poorly and bakes up dense, while the flour should be added gradually to avoid a stiff dough.
“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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