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Bread

Excellent Bread for Breakfast

A soft, yeasted bread made with mashed potato, lard, and flour, baked at 400°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,611 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Excellent Bread for Breakfast

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. In a large bowl, combine flour, lard, mashed potato, salt, yeast, and sugar.

  2. Add enough cold water or warm milk to make a soft dough.

  3. Knead the dough for 30 minutes.

  4. Let it rise in a cool place in summer and a warm place in winter for about 2 hours.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough lightly without kneading.

  2. Grease your hands with lard. Grease the top of the shaped dough.

  3. Let it rise again for 30 minutes.

  4. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for 30 minutes, or 45 minutes if in loaf or roll form.

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 + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Walnut + potatotop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together342 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and milk 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

Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure and chew.
Yeast
Produces gas during the rises, making the bread light and airy.
Mashed potato
Adds moisture and starch that keep the bread soft and tender.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and helps the crust brown.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and promotes browning in the crust.

The step that matters

Knead the dough for 30 minutes. Kneading develops the gluten network that traps the gas yeast produces. Under-kneaded dough rises poorly and bakes dense, while the shaping step must stay light so that network and the rise are not knocked out.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Milletfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, potato, sugar, milk. 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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