Name: Yeast
Ingredients: 3 pints water; 6 large potatoes; 1 pint flour; 1 tablespoon salt

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 ↓

Yeast

Ingredients

3 pints water
6 large potatoes
1 pint flour
1 tablespoon salt

Directions

Boil the potatoes until done.
Reserve the potato water and pour it over 1 pint of flour.
Mash the potatoes thoroughly.
Mix the mashed potatoes with the flour and salt.

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.

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: Provide starch and moisture that give the dough its soft, tender body.
Flour: Forms the gluten and starch structure that holds the bread together.
Potato water: Adds moisture and dissolved starch that help bind the flour into a dough.

“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.