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Bread Made with a Starter

A bread made with a starter, mashed Irish potatoes, sugar, salt, lard, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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 ↓

Bread Made with a Starter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Make a starter by soaking the yeast cake in lukewarm water, then mix in mashed potatoes, sugar, and salt.

  2. Set the starter in a warm place overnight after adding it to the mixture, as directed below.

Make the dough

  1. For the bread, combine mashed potatoes, sugar, and salt with boiling water when lukewarm.

  2. Add the starter to the mixture and set it in a warm place overnight.

  3. The next morning, reserve ½ pint of starter for the next baking.

  4. Thicken the remaining mixture to a batter; when foamy, add lard and flour.

  5. Knead until smooth, let it rise, then shape into loaves, allow to rise again, and 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. 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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Potato + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,978 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Yeast cake
Ferments the starter, producing gas that makes the dough rise.
Mashed irish potatoes
Adds moisture and body to the dough, giving a soft, tender crumb.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and softens the texture.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the bread its structure.

The step that matters

Knead until smooth, then let it rise. Kneading develops gluten so the dough can trap the gas made by the yeast; under-kneaded dough rises poorly and bakes dense.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, 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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