Skip to main content
Bread

Home-made Yeast

A yeast-based bread dough made with potatoes, sugar, ginger, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Potato and ginger work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 992 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Home-made Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the yeast cakes in warm water.

  2. Pour hot water over the flour and mix together in the morning.

  3. Boil, drain, and mash the potatoes.

Make the dough

  1. Add the mashed potatoes to boiling water, sugar, ginger, and salt.

  2. When lukewarm, add the yeast mixture.

Rise and finish

  1. Let rise overnight.

  2. When mixing bread, use equal parts of yeast and warm water, and mix stiff at once.

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 + gingertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together992 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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 starch and moisture, giving the dough a soft, tender crumb.
Yeast cakes
Produce gas as they ferment, making the dough rise.
Flour
Provides starch and gluten that give the bread its structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and feeds the yeast, supporting fermentation.
Ginger
Adds a warm, aromatic flavour to the bread.

The step that matters

When lukewarm, add the yeast mixture.. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the potato mixture must be cooled to lukewarm before the yeast goes in. If it is too cool, fermentation and rising will be slow.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, ginger. 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 potato bread recipes

Sweet 14Rolls 5Beef and Pudding 4Hop 3Hopped 3Irish 3 See all 263 →

You might also like

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipesNut BreadNut Bread109 recipes