Skip to main content
Bread

Potato Yeast

A yeast dough made from boiled potatoes, flour, salt, sugar, and water.

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

Why it works: Flour and sugar 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 ↓

Potato Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Peel and boil the potatoes until tender.

  2. Remove from water and mash well.

Make the dough

  1. Sift the flour over the hot mashed potatoes and mix.

  2. Add the salt and sugar, then slowly stir in the reserved boiling water.

  3. Pass the mixture through a colander and let it cool slightly.

  4. Stir in the yeast when the mixture is nearly cool.

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. Flour + sugartop 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
Starch and body that give the bread a moist, soft crumb.
Yeast
Produces gas as it feeds on sugars, making the dough rise.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the bread structure.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and helps the crust brown.

The step that matters

Stir in the yeast when the mixture is nearly cool. Yeast is killed by high heat, so adding it to a still-hot mixture can stop the rise. Waiting until the mixture is nearly cool keeps the yeast alive and active.

Swap the potato

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

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

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

You might also like

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipesNut BreadNut Bread109 recipes