Name: Rye Bread
Ingredients: 1 quart warm water; 1 teacup wet yeast; rye flour (enough to make a batter); 1 pint cornmeal

Why it works: Rye and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,320 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Rye Bread

Ingredients

1 quart warm water
1 teacup wet yeast
rye flour (enough to make a batter)
1 pint cornmeal

Directions

Make the sponge

Mix warm water, wet yeast, and enough rye flour to create a batter.
Place the mixture in a warm area to rise overnight.
Scald the cornmeal and let it cool.

Shape and bake

Add the cooled cornmeal to the sponge and stir in enough rye flour to make a dough thick enough to knead.
Knead the dough lightly.
Let it rise.
Mold it into loaves.
Place the loaves in deep pie tins.
Let them rise again.
Bake the loaves.

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.

Rye + flourtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,320 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Wet yeast: Ferments the batter so the sponge rises and gives the bread its lift.
Rye flour: Forms the batter and dough structure, with a distinctive flavor and a dense crumb.
Cornmeal: Adds body and a coarser texture to the crumb.

“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.