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Bread

Good Sweet Bread

A yeast-leavened sweet bread made with water or milk, yeast cakes, flour, and optional coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Good Sweet Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Dissolve the yeast cakes in the liquid.

  2. Mix in enough flour to form a dough.

  3. Knead the dough until smooth and elastic.

  4. Let the dough rise in a warm place until doubled in size.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough into a loaf and place it in a greased pan.

  2. Preheat the oven to 500°F (260°C).

  3. Bake the bread until the center reaches 212°F (100°C).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Yeast cakes
Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes it rise.
Flour
Forms the dough's structure, which traps gas and sets as it bakes.
Liquid (water or milk)
Hydrates the flour and yeast so gluten can develop into a dough.

The step that matters

Letting the dough rise until doubled. Yeast needs time and warmth to produce enough gas. Rising too little leaves a dense loaf, while the dough needs enough structure to hold that gas.

“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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