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Light Bread Yeast

A yeast-leavened bread made with mashed potatoes, cornmeal, and leaf juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and corn match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 938 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Light Bread Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the yeast in a little cold water.

  2. Boil the potatoes until done, then mash them.

  3. Place the leaves in a cloth and boil them.

Make the dough

  1. Add ½ cup of this juice to the mashed potatoes along with the cooking water.

  2. Scald the corn meal with the potato mixture and let it cool.

  3. Add the yeast and sugar to the cooled mixture and knead well.

  4. Mold the dough and let it dry in the shade.

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 + corntop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together938 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Peach + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together94 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Potato + peachtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together71 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Sugar + corntop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Dry yeast
Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes it rise and become light.
Potatoes
Add moisture and starch, giving the dough a soft, tender texture.
Corn meal
Forms the bulk of the dough, and scalding it softens its starch so it binds with the potato mixture.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a mild sweetness to the bread.

The step that matters

Let the scalded corn meal mixture cool before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the potato and corn meal mixture must cool before the yeast and sugar go in, or the dough will not rise.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, sugar, corn. 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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