Skip to main content
Main

Excellent Bread for Breakfast

A soft loaf made with flour, lard, mashed potato, yeast, sugar, and water or milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Make the dough

  1. Combine flour, lard, mashed potato, salt, yeast, and sugar in a large bowl.

  2. Add cold water in summer or warm milk in winter to form a soft dough.

  3. Knead the dough for 30 minutes.

  4. Let the dough rise in a cool place in summer or a warm place in winter for 2 hours.

Shape and rise

  1. Shape the dough lightly without kneading.

  2. Grease your hands with lard.

  3. Grease the top of the shaped dough.

  4. Let it rise again for 30 minutes.

Bake

  1. Bake 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 bread its structure.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and softens the texture.
Mashed potato
Holds moisture, keeping the bread soft and slow to dry out.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds mild sweetness and browning.
Cold water or warm milk
Hydrates the flour so the gluten can form a soft, workable dough.

The step that matters

The first rise. Yeast activity depends on temperature, so the dough must rise in a cool place in summer and a warm place in winter. Too cold slows the rise and too hot can overproof it, leaving a dense or collapsed loaf.

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.

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipesSweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipes