Bread is a bakery with 210 known flavor compounds. The most distinctive molecule is 9,17-octadecadienal. It pairs most strongly with parsley, sharing 109 flavor compounds. Bread appears in 43,612 recipes, most commonly in european cuisine.
Maillard reaction creates roasted malty notes. Lactobacilli produce cheesy acidic dairy notes and caramel compounds.
Compounds ranked by rarity — the higher the score, the more distinctive to this ingredient.
Of the ~226 molecules that drive perceived food aroma (Dunkel et al. 2014), Bread's inventory contains 65. Most of the other 145 compounds are below detection threshold.
+ 53 more — showing top 12 by class and threshold.
Generalist = appears in >25% of foods (Maillard / fermentation products). Individualist = appears in <5% of foods (carries signature notes). Threshold values are in clean water — the actual perception threshold in a food matrix can differ substantially.
How Bread's 210 known compounds break down by aroma category. Percentages are of compounds with a known label.
77 of 210 are distinctive to bread — they appear in under 10% of foods. The remainder are the background most foods share.
Ordered by measured impact in bread — concentration against odour threshold where both are published, then by how distinctive the molecule is across the graph. Molecules measured here but not established as odorants sit below those that are.
Ranked by median concentration across published studies. Only 28 of Bread's 210 compounds have a measured concentration in the literature — the rest are confirmed present but not yet quantified. Bars are log-scaled.
Ranked by how often cooks actually use them together, across 453,403 recipes — the familiar answer first. Each pairing still carries its molecular score and shared-compound count; only the ORDER differs. Counts cover every characterised molecule the two ingredients have in common, not only the aroma-active ones, so they can exceed an ingredient’s aroma-compound count. For the chemistry-first view — where the surprising pairings live — see the molecular network below, the side-by-side comparison, or the Pairing Tool.
Bread and its 10 closest compound-sharing relatives. Spoke thickness = shared compounds; circle size = that ingredient's own compound count. Drag to rearrange, scroll to zoom, click to open.
Compare Bread side-by-side
Drawn from PubMed + Europe PMC + food-science journals. Click any title to read the full abstract on the original source.
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Naan, a traditional leavened flatbread, exhibits typical regional variations in flavor and texture. In this study, sourdough samples of Naan were collected from nine households acr... Read abstract →
This study investigated the effects of silver carp muscle hydrolysate (SCMH) on volatile odor characteristics in frozen dough (FD) and its derived products using electronic nose an... Read abstract →
This study investigated the correlation between flavor compounds and basic physicochemical properties of ordinary wine and Musalais wine with different pretreatment processes deriv... Read abstract →
The characteristic aroma compounds of Chinese steamed bread (CSB) fermented with different starters were studied using HS-SPME-GC/MS, aroma recombination and omission experiments.... Read abstract →
