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Bread

Yeast for Bread

A yeast starter made from mashed potatoes, flour, sugar, salt, and yeast cake for baking bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar 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 ↓

Yeast for Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Stir flour, sugar, and salt into hot mashed potatoes until smooth.

  2. Add potato water and strain through a colander if lumpy.

  3. Let the mixture cool to lukewarm and add the dissolved yeast cake.

  4. Let stand for two days before using.

Bake the bread

  1. When ready to bake, mix 1 cup of yeast with 2 cups of water and enough flour to thicken.

  2. Let rise until light.

  3. Mix stiff and finish as you would any 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. Flour + sugartop 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
Adds starch and moisture that help the dough hold together and stay soft.
Flour
Provides gluten-forming protein and starch for structure and thickening.
Yeast cake
Produces carbon dioxide gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds mild sweetness.
Potato water
Adds moisture and a little starch to the starter.

The step that matters

Cool to lukewarm before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid. Cooling the potato mixture to lukewarm keeps the yeast alive so it can produce the gas that makes the bread rise.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar. 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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