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Bread

Bread

A loaf made from boiled potatoes, flour, sugar, salt, yeast, and butter or lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Boil the potatoes in plenty of water until soft.

  2. Mix flour, sugar, and salt in a large jar.

  3. Pour the hot potato water over the mixture and add the mashed potatoes.

  4. When cool, add enough warm water to make a gallon of the mixture.

  5. Add the soaked yeast cake and set in a warm place overnight.

Shape and bake

  1. In the morning, mold into a hard lump and let rise.

  2. Shape into loaves and let rise again before baking.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Potatoes
Mashed potatoes add moisture and body to the dough and help keep the bread soft.
Flour
Provides the starch and gluten that form the structure of the loaves.
Yeast cake
Ferments the sugars in the dough, producing gas that makes the bread rise.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation and adds mild sweetness and browning.

The step that matters

Overnight rise in a warm place. Yeast needs steady warmth to ferment slowly; if the dough is too cold it rises poorly, and if too hot the yeast can overwork and sour the dough.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits about as well
  2. Sweet potatofits about as well
  3. Potatothe original
  4. Leekfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, 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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