Skip to main content
Dessert

375 Potato Yeast

A yeast-leavened potato dough made by boiling, mashing, and mixing potatoes with water, honey or sugar, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Potato and honey work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 351 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

375 Potato Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the potato mixture

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender.

  2. Peel the potatoes.

  3. Weigh the potatoes.

  4. Mash the potatoes finely while hot.

  5. Mix the mashed potatoes with boiling water, using 1 quart of water for each pound of potatoes.

  6. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

  7. Add honey or brown sugar, 1 ounce for each quart of water.

  8. Boil the mixture until it reaches a batter-like consistency.

Ferment and store

  1. Let the mixture cool.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of yeast for every quart of water.

  3. Cover the mixture with a cloth.

  4. Let it rise overnight.

  5. Store the mixture in a bottle for future use.

  6. Pour off any thin liquid on top.

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 + honeytop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together351 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Mealy potatoes
Starch that gives the starter body and a soft, moist crumb when baked.
Honey or brown sugar
Feeds the yeast, providing sugar for fermentation and rising.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing gas that leavens the dough.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must cool enough that it can be added safely and then ferment as intended.

“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.

You might also like

Deep-Fried Potato BallsDeep-Fried Potato Balls119 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes