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Bread

Excellent Bread for Breakfast

A soft, yeasted bread made with mashed potato, lard, and flour, baked for breakfast.

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

Make the dough

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

  2. Add 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, not exceeding warm milk temperature.

Shape and bake

  1. Two hours before breakfast, shape the dough lightly without kneading, greasing your hands with lard.

  2. Grease the top of the shaped dough and let it rise again for 30 minutes.

  3. 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
Provides the structure that the dough's gluten network builds around.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and keeps the bread soft.
Mashed potato
Adds moisture and starch that help the bread stay soft and fresh.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide that makes the dough rise and gives it an airy texture.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and promotes browning in the crust.

The step that matters

Let it rise in a cool place in summer and a warm place in winter, not exceeding warm milk temperature.. Yeast activity depends on temperature. Too much heat over-accelerates fermentation and weakens the dough's structure, while too little slows the rise, so the dough must be kept within the stated range.

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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