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 100°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.
Prepare the dough
Sift the flour into a bread pan, reserving 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 tightly, 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 in a warm place (90°F to 100°F) or rolls for 1.5 hours.
Bake and cool
Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Bake loaves for 45 to 60 minutes or rolls for 30 minutes, placing them close together.
For French rolls, bake for 15 minutes.
Remove the bread from the pans and let it cool against something until cool.
Store in a clean, dry stone pot or tin box.
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
- All-purpose flour
- Forms the gluten network that gives the bread its structure and chew.
- Yeast
- Produces carbon dioxide during fermentation, which makes the dough rise.
- Water
- Hydrates the flour so gluten forms and activates the yeast.
- Lard
- Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture.
- Sugar
- Feeds the yeast and adds a little sweetness and browning.
The step that matters
Kneading the dough. Kneading aligns and strengthens gluten strands, which trap the gas from the yeast. Too little kneading leaves a dense, weak loaf that rises poorly.
“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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