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Hop-yeast Bread

A potato-based bread made with hop yeast, flour, salt, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Hop-yeast Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potato starter

  1. Peel the potatoes and boil them.

  2. Mash the potatoes in the boiling water.

  3. Pour the hot potato mixture into a bread pan with 2 tablespoons of flour, 1 teaspoon of salt, and 1 teaspoon of sugar.

  4. Strain the mixture when cooled slightly.

  5. Add a small cup of yeast.

  6. Let the mixture rise in a warm place overnight.

Make and knead the dough

  1. Sift flour into the bread pan.

  2. Make a hole in the center of the pan.

  3. Pour the yeast mixture into the hole.

  4. Add 1 quart of lukewarm water with 1 teaspoon of salt dissolved in it.

  5. Stir until stiff enough to knead.

  6. Knead the dough for 15 minutes.

Rise and shape

  1. Place the dough in a floured bread pan.

  2. Cover the dough with another pan to rise slowly.

  3. Cover the dough with a warm, damp cloth if it stiffens on top.

  4. Turn the dough onto a breadboard.

  5. Knead the dough lightly.

  6. Shape the dough into a long roll.

  7. Cut the roll into loaves.

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 + 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
Add moisture and starch that give the bread a soft, tender crumb.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars and produces gas that makes the dough rise.
Flour
Forms gluten with the water, giving the dough structure and stretch.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and helps the dough rise and brown.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise slowly and keep it from stiffening. Yeast needs warm, moist conditions to produce gas steadily. If the surface dries and stiffens, the dough can rise unevenly, so covering it with a warm damp cloth helps keep it elastic.

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.

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