Name: First Prize Bread
Ingredients: 1½ cups all-purpose flour; 1 pound boiled potatoes, mashed; 2 cakes Bread-maker’s Yeast; Coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt'); Potato water (from boiling potatoes)

Why it works: Flour and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,355 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

First Prize Bread

Ingredients

1½ cups all-purpose flour
1 pound boiled potatoes, mashed
2 cakes Bread-maker’s Yeast
Coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')
Potato water (from boiling potatoes)

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the potato base

Boil and pare the potatoes, then mash them.
In a bowl, combine the mashed potatoes with the flour and enough potato water to scald.
Let the mixture cool, then dissolve the yeast in slightly warm water and stir it into the mixture.
Set the mixture aside to rise.

Make the dough and rise

Before bed, dissolve the salt in warm water, stir in more flour, and let it rise overnight.
In the morning, mix the dough well and let it rise again.

Shape and bake

Once risen, knead the dough into loaves and let them rise for 30 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C) and bake the loaves for about one hour.

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.

Flour + potatotop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,355 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Potato + breadtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together434 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).
Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together10,383 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and bread barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,383 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

All-purpose flour: Provides the starch and gluten that give the loaves their structure.
Boiled potatoes: Add moisture and softness to the crumb, and starch that helps the dough hold water.
Bread-maker's yeast: Produces carbon dioxide gas as it ferments, making the dough rise.
Potato water: Adds moisture and dissolved starch from the potatoes to the dough.

The step that matters

Letting the mixture cool before adding yeast. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the scalded potato mixture must cool before the yeast is stirred in to keep it active and able to raise the dough.

Swap the potato

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

Arrowrootfits better
Shallotfits better
Leekfits better
Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, bread. 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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First Prize Bread