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Bread

Whole Wheat Bread

A yeast‑leavened loaf made with whole wheat flour, milk, water, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Whole Wheat Bread

Why it works: Milk and wheat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Whole Wheat Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Dissolve the yeast in the water.

  2. Mix the scalding milk with the water until lukewarm.

  3. Add the dissolved yeast, sugar, and salt to the milk mixture.

  4. Stir in the whole wheat flour and beat hard, adding more flour to form a manageable dough.

  5. Knead the dough on a board for 20 minutes.

  6. Return the dough to the pan and let it rise for 3 to 4 hours.

Shape and bake

  1. Knead for 5 minutes, shape into loaves, and let rise for 1 hour.

  2. 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.

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. Milk + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Whole wheat flour
Forms the dough structure and gives the bread its hearty texture and flavor.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide as it ferments, making the dough rise and become airy.
Milk
Adds richness, softness, and browning to the crumb and crust.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a little sweetness and browning to the crust.

The step that matters

Adding flour to the dough. Whole wheat flour absorbs water more slowly than white flour, so adding flour gradually until the dough is manageable keeps it from becoming too stiff or too wet to knead and rise well.

“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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