Why it works: Potato and ginger work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 992 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓
Quick Bread
Ingredients
Directions
Boil the potatoes until tender, then mash them well.
Steep a pinch of hops in a cup of water, then strain the hop-water into the mashed potatoes.
Add ginger, salt, and sugar to the potatoes.
Dissolve the yeast cake in a little lukewarm water.
In a large bowl, combine the sifted flour with warm water to make a sponge.
Mix in the potatoes and dissolved yeast, beating well together.
Let the sponge rise in a warm place for 1 hour until light.
Shape the dough into a large loaf and let it rise again for 30 minutes.
Knead the dough well, then shape into loaves.
Let the loaves rise for another 30 minutes before baking.
If baking in batches, knead any loaves that are getting too light before baking.
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.
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Potato + gingertop 12% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together992 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
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Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
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Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together5,355 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Ginger + flourtop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together8,564 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together14,054 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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
Swap the potato
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (hops, ginger, sugar, flour):
- Mustardfits better
- Arrowrootfits better
- Parsnipfits better
- Potatothe original
Fit is the average pairing score against hops, ginger, sugar, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.
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