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Bread

Compressed Yeast Bread

A yeast bread made with compressed yeast, flour, potatoes, lard, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Compressed Yeast Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Sift the flour into a mixing bowl.

  2. Cook the potatoes, mash them, and add to the flour.

  3. Stir in enough water to make a thick batter.

  4. Dissolve the yeast in a little water and add it to the mixture.

  5. Beat the mixture until light.

Make and rise the dough

  1. Add salt, sugar, and lard, mixing into a lump with minimal flour.

  2. Let the dough rise until light.

  3. Shape into loaves and let rise again.

Bake and make rolls

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

  2. For rolls, take some dough, roll it out, cut with a cookie cutter, rub the tops with butter, fold over, and let rise before baking.

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. Flour + eggtop 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).

Flour and egg 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the gas bubbles and gives the loaf its body.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Potatoes
Add moisture and starch that help the bread stay soft and moist.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and gives a softer texture.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and helps the crust brown during baking.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise until light. Yeast gas must be trapped by the gluten network to lighten the dough. Rising too little leaves a dense loaf, while rising too long can weaken the structure so it collapses or bakes flat.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, egg. 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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