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Bread

Potato Yeast

A bread made from boiled potatoes, flour, water, sugar, salt, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Potato Yeast

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 ↓

Potato Yeast

4 loaves

Ingredients

Directions

Make the potato yeast

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender, then pass them and the cooking water through a sieve.

  2. Mix the flour with enough water to make a smooth paste.

  3. Add the paste to the boiling water and cook until it thickens to a thin gravy.

  4. While hot, stir in the sugar, coarse sea salt, and the strained potato water.

  5. When the mixture is lukewarm, add the yeast cakes dissolved in a little water.

Use the yeast

  1. Use 1 quart of this yeast to make 4 loaves of bread.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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
Their starch and cooking water thicken the mixture and add moisture to the finished dough.
Flour
Cooked into a paste that thickens the liquid into a gravy-like base.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast, giving it fuel to become active and produce gas.
Yeast cakes
Ferment the mixture, producing gas that makes the bread rise.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast to a lukewarm mixture. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the mixture must be lukewarm before the dissolved yeast cakes are added. Hot liquid would stop 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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