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Bread

White Potato Bread

A bread made from boiled potatoes and wheat flour, baked into small cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and wheat match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 235 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

White Potato Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Wash and peel the potatoes.

  2. Boil the potatoes in just enough water to cover them.

  3. Mash the potatoes through a colander with the boiling water.

Make the dough

  1. Heat the mixture to boiling point.

  2. Mix in wheat flour until the dough is stiff enough to knead.

  3. Cut the dough into small cakes.

Bake

  1. Bake the cakes in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C).

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. Potato + wheattop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together235 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + flourtop 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

Potatoes
Provide starch and moisture that give the bread a soft, tender crumb.
Wheat flour
Forms gluten with the moisture, giving the stiff dough its structure for kneading and shaping.

The step that matters

Mix in wheat flour until the dough is stiff enough to knead. Adding too little flour leaves the dough sticky and weak, while too much makes the bread dense and dry. Gluten develops as the flour is worked in, so the dough should be firm but still pliable.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against wheat, 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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