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Bread

An Easy Way to Make Good Bread

A yeast‑leavened potato bread made with flour, salt, lard, sugar, and potato water.

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 ↓

An Easy Way to Make Good Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potato mixture

  1. Boil and mash the potatoes until fine.

  2. Add flour and scald with potato water.

  3. Mix in salt, lard, and sugar.

  4. Let the mixture cool to lukewarm, then add the dissolved yeast.

  5. Prepare this mixture at noon and let it stand overnight, stirring 2-3 times.

Make the dough

  1. In the morning, warm the flour and mix it in until stiff enough to knead.

  2. Knead the dough thoroughly for 30 minutes.

Rise, shape and bake

  1. Rub melted lard over the top and set in a warm place to rise.

  2. Once light, shape into loaves, handling as little as possible.

  3. Rub melted lard over the top and let rise again.

  4. Bake for 50 minutes.

  5. After baking, rub the tops of the loaves with butter to keep the crust soft.

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. 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
Add moisture and starch that give the bread a soft, tender crumb.
Flour
Provides the gluten network that gives the dough structure and stretch.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and helps the crust brown.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and feeds the yeast, helping the dough rise and brown.

The step that matters

Add the yeast only when the mixture is lukewarm. Yeast is killed by high heat, so adding it to a hot scalded mixture can stop the rise. Cooling to lukewarm keeps the yeast alive and active for the long overnight fermentation.

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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