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Drink

Toast Water

A beverage made by soaking toasted bread in water, optionally flavored with lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Toast Water

Why it works: Bread and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,445 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Toast Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Toast the bread slices until dark brown, but do not burn them.

  2. Place the toast in a deep bowl.

Steep and strain

  1. Pour the water over the toast and let it stand for 2-3 hours.

  2. Afterward, pour the water from the bread.

  3. Optionally, soak a piece of lemon peel with the bread for flavor.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Bread + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Dark brown bread
Toasting browns the bread, and the browned crust releases roasted flavor and color into the water.
Water
Acts as the solvent that draws flavor and color out of the toasted bread during steeping.

The step that matters

Toasting the bread. The bread must be dark brown but not burned. Browning builds roasted, toasty flavor through Maillard reactions, while burnt bread turns bitter and carries that bitterness into the water.

“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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