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Bread

Bread Dough

A basic bread dough made with flour, optional boiled potatoes, water, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Bread Dough

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.

Make the dough

  1. If using a sponge, mix a thin batter with a little flour.

  2. Let the batter stand until filled with large bubbles.

  3. Add the rest of the flour.

  4. Knead the dough for about 25 minutes, pulling the upper portions with your fingers and pushing the lower parts with the balls of your hands until it no longer sticks.

  5. Set the dough aside to rise.

  6. Cover the dough with one or two layers of cloth to exclude air.

Shape and rise

  1. Fill the baking pan half full with the dough.

  2. Cover it well and place it in a warm spot.

  3. When the dough has doubled in size (about 1 hour), mold it into equally sized loaves.

  4. Let the loaves rise again in the baking pans.

Bake

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Bake the loaves until a brown crust forms, about 15 minutes.

  3. Continue baking for 1 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. Flour + potatotop 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

Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the bread its structure and chew.
Water
Hydrates the flour so gluten can develop and the dough can be kneaded.
Grated boiled potatoes
Adds moisture and starch, keeping the loaf soft and moist.

The step that matters

Knead until the dough no longer sticks. Kneading aligns and develops gluten strands, which trap gas during rising and give the loaf its structure. Under-kneaded dough rises poorly and bakes up 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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