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Drink

Toast-water

A beverage made by steeping toasted bread and citrus peel in boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and orange are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,084 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Toast-water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the toast

  1. Remove the crust from the stale bread slice.

  2. Toast the bread on both sides until golden, but do not burn it.

  3. Break the toasted bread into 3 or 4 pieces.

Steep and strain

  1. Place the pieces in a pitcher with the orange or lemon peel.

  2. Pour 1 pint of boiling water over the bread and peel.

  3. Cover the pitcher with a napkin and let it cool.

  4. Strain the water for use.

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. Bread + orangetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,084 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Toasted bread gives the water a mild, toasty flavor as it steeps.
Orange or lemon peel
Citrus peel adds a light aroma to the water.

The step that matters

Toasting the bread until golden, not burnt. Toasting browns the starches and develops flavor through the Maillard reaction. Burnt bread turns bitter and carries that bitterness into the water, so stop when the bread is golden.

“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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