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Bread

A bread made from mashed potatoes, water, salt, sugar, yeast, and flour, baked after rising.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Cook potatoes until soft.

  2. Mash the cooked potatoes to make 1 cup. Use the potato water.

  3. Add enough lukewarm water to total 3 pints.

  4. Stir in salt, sugar, and yeast.

  5. Thicken the mixture with flour.

  6. Let the mixture rise overnight in a warm place.

Shape and bake

  1. In the morning, add more flour to make a stiff dough.

  2. Place the dough in a warm area until it rises.

  3. Knead the dough into loaves using lard on the board, avoiding flour.

  4. Let the loaves rise again.

  5. Bake the loaves.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. 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

Mashed potatoes
Add starch and moisture that give the bread a soft, tender crumb.
Yeast
Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes it rise.
Flour
Forms the gluten structure that traps gas and holds the loaves together.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a little sweetness and browning.

The step that matters

Let the mixture rise overnight in a warm place. Yeast needs warmth and time to ferment fully; too cool and the dough rises slowly, too hot and the yeast can die or the dough can over-ferment and sour.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, flour):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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