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Bread

How to Make Bread Without Yeast or Hops

A yeast-free bread made from mashed potatoes, sugar, salt, water, and flour, fermented and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

How to Make Bread Without Yeast or Hops

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Cook and mash the potatoes.

  2. Place the mashed potatoes in a 1‑quart jar.

  3. Add sugar and salt, then fill the jar with cold water.

  4. Stir thoroughly and cover without rubber.

  5. Let it stand until it ferments.

  6. Prepare another jar in the same way and let it stand overnight.

  7. In the morning, combine the contents of both jars in a bread bowl.

  8. Mix well and fill one jar for your next baking starter.

Make and bake the bread

  1. Use the remaining quart for sponge, stir in flour, and let it rise.

  2. Mix stiff, let it rise again, shape into loaves, and bake when raised.

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

Potatoes
Supply starch and nutrients that feed the microbes driving the starter's fermentation.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and bacteria in the starter, speeding fermentation and adding slight sweetness.
Flour
Builds the gluten network that traps gas, giving the dough structure and its rise.

The step that matters

Letting the starter ferment fully. Fermentation by wild yeast and bacteria produces the gas and acids that leaven the bread. If the starter has not fermented enough, the sponge will rise weakly, so it should stand until it is visibly active before you use it.

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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