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Potato Yeast

A yeast dough made from boiled potatoes, sugar, water, milk-warm potato water, yeast, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Potato Yeast

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 ↓

Potato Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potato mixture

  1. Boil the potatoes in enough water until nearly done.

  2. Sift the potatoes and add the white sugar.

  3. Scald the mixture with the boiling water from the potatoes.

  4. Let it stand for a while, then thin it with the milk-warm potato water until quite thin.

Start the yeast

  1. Start the yeast with a small cupful of yeast.

  2. Use 1 cup of this yeast for 3 light pints of flour.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and flour 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

Potatoes
Add starch and moisture, giving the bread a soft, moist crumb.
White sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness to the bread.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide gas that makes the dough rise.
Flour
Forms gluten, the protein network that gives the bread its structure.

The step that matters

Thin the mixture with milk-warm water. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the potato water must stay only milk-warm when it is added. Liquid that is too hot can stop the yeast from rising the dough.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk, flour. 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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