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Bread

Light Yeast Bread

A yeast bread made with mashed potatoes, flour, water, yeast, sugar, salt, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour 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 ↓

Light Yeast Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Peel the potatoes. Boil the potatoes. Mash the potatoes.

  2. Pour 1 quart of boiling water over the mashed potatoes. Strain the mixture through a sieve.

  3. When the mixture is warm, add 1 cup of yeast, 1 tablespoon of sugar, and 1 tablespoon of salt.

  4. Stir in 3½ quarts of flour. Beat the mixture well with a spoon.

  5. Set the mixture in a warm place to rise until well risen.

Knead and shape

  1. Place 1 pint of flour on a kneading board. Turn the dough onto the board. Add 1 tablespoon of lard.

  2. Knead for 20 minutes, using the pint of flour.

  3. Let the dough rise for 1 hour.

  4. Form the dough into loaves. Keep each loaf to 1 pint of dough.

  5. Let the loaves rise for 40 minutes.

Bake

  1. Bake the loaves for 45 minutes.

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. Sugar + flourtop 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

Potatoes
Add starch and moisture, giving the bread a soft, tender crumb.
Yeast
Produces gas as it ferments, making the dough rise and become airy.
All-purpose flour
Forms gluten when kneaded, giving the dough its structure.
Lard
Adds fat, which tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture.
White sugar
Feeds the yeast, helping fermentation and rise along with some browning.

The step that matters

Knead for 20 minutes with the extra flour. Kneading develops gluten so the dough can trap gas. The dough is sticky at first, so the added flour is needed to handle it, but adding too much makes the bread dense and dry.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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