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First Prize Bread

A potato-based bread loaf made with flour, yeast, salt, and water, baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and flour 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

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 batter

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender, then mash them finely.

  2. Scald 1 saucerful of flour with the potato water, adding more water if too thick to make a thin batter.

  3. When the mixture is warm, add 1½ cakes of Breadmaker’s Yeast and let it rise overnight.

Make and shape the dough

  1. In the morning, dissolve ½ teaspoon of salt in ½ cup of warm water.

  2. Combine the risen yeast mixture with the salt water, adding more flour while kneading for about an hour.

  3. When the dough is light, shape it into loaves and place in pans.

  4. Let the loaves rise again until ready to bake.

Bake

  1. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for 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.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Add moisture and starch that give the bread a soft, moist crumb.
All-purpose flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough structure and lets it hold its shape.
Yeast
Produces gas as it ferments, making the dough rise and become light.

The step that matters

Kneading the dough with added flour. Kneading develops the gluten network that traps the gas from the yeast. Adding flour gradually keeps the dough workable without making it stiff and dense.

“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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