Skip to main content
Bread

Yeast Bread

A potato-based yeast bread made with lard and flour, baked after rising.

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

Why it works: Sugar and flour 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 ↓

Yeast Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. Pare, boil, and mash the potatoes.

  2. Pour 1 quart of boiling water over them and strain through a colander.

  3. Let the mixture cool to lukewarm.

  4. Stir in the yeast, sugar, salt, and enough flour to make a stiff dough.

  5. Beat the mixture vigorously.

  6. Set it in a warm place to rise for 4 to 5 hours.

Knead and shape

  1. Once risen, add enough flour to knead without sticking.

  2. Turn out onto a kneading board and rub in the lard.

  3. Knead for at least 20 minutes, adding as little flour as possible.

  4. Place the dough back in the pan and let it rise for 1 hour.

  5. Form the dough into loaves.

  6. Let the loaves rise until light, about 45 minutes.

Bake

  1. Bake for 45 minutes.

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. Sugar + flourtop 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
Starch that holds water and gives the bread a soft, moist crumb.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide as it feeds on sugar, making the dough rise.
Flour
Builds the gluten network that traps gas and gives the loaf its structure.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and helps the dough rise and brown lightly.

The step that matters

Kneading the dough for at least 20 minutes. Kneading aligns and develops gluten strands, which trap the gas from the yeast. Adding too much flour during kneading makes the dough stiff and dense, so use as little as possible.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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.

More yeast bread recipes

Milk 27Compressed 23German 21Potato 21No 20Hop 8 See all 83 →

You might also like

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