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Bread

A loaf made from mashed potatoes, potato water, yeast, flour, salt, sugar, 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 ↓

Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. Cook potatoes until soft and mash to make 1 cup.

  2. Use the potato water and add enough lukewarm water to make 3 pints.

  3. Stir in salt, sugar, and liquid yeast.

  4. Add flour to thicken the mixture quite stiff.

  5. Let the sponge rise overnight in a warm place.

Make and bake the dough

  1. In the morning, add more flour to make a stiff dough.

  2. Knead the dough on a greased surface without adding flour.

  3. Let the dough rise until light, then shape into loaves.

  4. Bake the loaves until golden brown.

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

Mashed potatoes
Add moisture and starch that give the bread a soft, tender crumb.
Liquid yeast
Ferments the sugars so the dough rises and becomes light.
Flour
Forms gluten with the liquid, giving the dough structure and a chewy crumb.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a little sweetness and browning.

The step that matters

Knead the dough on a greased surface without adding flour.. Extra flour dried into a stiff dough makes the loaves tough and dry. Kneading on a greased surface develops gluten while keeping the dough soft enough to shape.

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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