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Flour and Potato Rolls

A yeasted roll made with boiled potatoes, sweet cream, milk, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,611 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Flour and Potato Rolls

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Boil and dry the potatoes.

  2. Mix the potatoes with sweet cream and milk.

  3. Rub the mixture through a wire sieve into the flour.

  4. Mix the warm milk with yeast and add to the flour mixture.

  5. Knead into a dough and let it rise.

Shape and bake

  1. Form into rolls and bake at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

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 + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

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

  2. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Potato + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Add moisture and a soft, tender crumb to the dough.
Flour
Provides the structure that gluten forms as the dough is kneaded.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the dough, producing gas that makes it rise.
Sweet cream
Adds fat for richness and a more tender, delicate texture.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness, and its milk sugars help the crust brown.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise. Yeast needs enough time and warmth to produce gas. If the dough rises too little, the rolls stay dense; if it over-rises, the structure weakens and they may collapse.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits about as well
  2. Potatothe original
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Spinachfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, milk, 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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