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Bread

Dairy Bread Without Yeast

A yeast-free bread made with flour, salt, powdered sugar, baking soda, and sour buttermilk, baked at 400°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and buttermilk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,721 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Dairy Bread Without Yeast

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

  1. Mix the salt with the flour.

  2. Blend the sugar and soda, sift them, and mix thoroughly with the flour.

Make and bake

  1. Make a firm but not hard dough with the buttermilk, which should be quite acid but not rancid.

  2. Bake in a well-heated oven at 400°F (200°C) for about 1 hour.

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.

  1. Flour + buttermilktop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + buttermilktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked 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 structure of the loaf once mixed with buttermilk.
Carbonate of soda
Reacts with the acid in buttermilk to produce gas, which lifts the dough.
Sour buttermilk
Supplies acid to activate the soda and moisture to bind the dough.

The step that matters

Blending the soda and sugar evenly into the flour. Soda that is not evenly distributed reacts in pockets, leaving bitter patches and uneven rising. Sifting and thorough mixing spread it through the flour before the liquid is added.

“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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