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Salt-Rising Bread. Milk-Yeast.

A bread made with milk yeast, potatoes, and water, baked in greased tins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Salt-Rising Bread. Milk-Yeast.

3 loaves

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Combine 3 tablespoons flour, 2 tablespoons salt, and 2 tablespoons sugar in a bowl.

  2. Scald with 1 pint boiling water.

  3. Once cool, add 2 yeast cakes or 1 cup of soft yeast.

  4. Boil and mash 12 potatoes.

  5. Add 3 quarts hot water and let cool.

  6. Combine the cooled potato mixture with the yeast mixture and let stand overnight.

Shape and bake

  1. For 3 loaves, take 3 pints of the mixture and stir it into sifted flour until it reaches the right consistency to knead.

  2. Knead the dough into loaves.

  3. Place loaves in greased tins.

  4. Let rise.

  5. Bake.

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. Flour + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + potatotop 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

Yeast cakes or soft yeast
Ferments the mixture so the dough rises and becomes light.
Potatoes
Add starch and moisture that help the dough hold water and stay soft.
Sifted flour
Provides the gluten-forming structure that holds the risen loaves together.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and supports fermentation.

The step that matters

Stirring the mixture into flour to the right consistency. Too little flour leaves the dough sticky and hard to knead, while too much makes the loaves dense and dry. Kneading develops gluten, which traps gas so the bread rises well.

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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