Skip to main content
Bread

Sponge Bread

Sponge Bread is a yeast‑leavened bread made from mashed potatoes, flour, and water.

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

Why it works: Potato and flour 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 ↓

Sponge Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender, then mash them finely.

  2. Add the flour to the mashed potatoes.

  3. Pour in the water used to boil the potatoes and the yeast.

  4. Let the mixture rise overnight.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough into bread or rolls.

  2. Bake in an even, steady oven.

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 + 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

Irish potatoes
Add starch and moisture, giving the bread a soft, tender crumb.
Flour
Its proteins form gluten, giving the dough structure to hold its shape.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the dough, releasing gas that makes it rise.
Water from boiling potatoes
Hydrates the flour so gluten forms and the yeast can become active.

The step that matters

Let the mixture rise overnight. Yeast needs enough time to ferment and produce gas. If the dough is not allowed to rise fully, the bread will be dense and heavy after baking.

“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.

More sponge bread recipes

Milk 6Potato 6 See all 21 →

You might also like

Potato BreadPotato Bread124 recipesCornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipes