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Bread Sponge

A potato-based bread sponge made by boiling, mashing, and fermenting potatoes with sugar, salt, water, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Bread Sponge

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. Wash the potatoes.

  2. Boil the potatoes with the skin until soft.

  3. Mash the boiled potatoes in a gallon crock.

  4. Add sugar, salt, and warm water to the mashed potatoes.

  5. Cool the mixture with cold water until lukewarm.

  6. Soak the yeast cake in lukewarm water.

  7. Add the soaked yeast cake to the sponge.

  8. Make this sponge several days before baking.

Prepare the sponge for baking

  1. Boil the potatoes with the skin until soft.

  2. Mash the boiled potatoes.

  3. Add sugar and salt to the mashed potatoes.

  4. Use enough warm water to make the desired amount of bread.

  5. Add the first sponge to the mixture.

  6. Make the sponge the night before baking.

  7. Reserve a quart of the sponge for the next baking and keep it in a cool place.

  8. Sieve the sponge to remove potato lumps and skin before setting the bread.

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. Potato + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide starch and moisture that give the sponge body and help the bread stay soft.
Yeast cake
Produces gas as it ferments, causing the sponge and dough to rise.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast so fermentation starts and proceeds steadily.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture until lukewarm before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the mash must be cooled to lukewarm before the soaked yeast cake goes in; too hot and the sponge will not rise.

“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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