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Yeast Bread for Small Families

A yeast bread made with mashed potatoes, sugar, boiling water, flour, yeast foam, and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour 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 ↓

Yeast Bread for Small Families

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. Mix the flour with enough warm water in a gallon crock to make a thin paste.

  2. Run the hot potatoes through a potato ricer onto the paste.

  3. Beat together.

  4. Add the boiling water.

  5. Stir well.

  6. Set aside to cool until tepid.

  7. Soak the yeast foam in ½ cup of warm water for 1 hour.

  8. Add the soaked yeast foam along with the sugar.

  9. Cover.

  10. Let rise in a warm place.

  11. If light at bedtime, add the salt. Stir well.

  12. Let stand overnight.

Make the dough

  1. In the morning, scald 2 tablespoons of flour with 1 pint of boiling water.

  2. Beat until smooth.

  3. If the yeast mixture is cold, combine it with the warm flour mixture.

  4. Add 2 tablespoons of sugar.

  5. Add 1 tablespoon of salt.

  6. Stir again.

  7. Add enough flour to make a sponge with a consistency similar to bread dough.

  8. Let rise until light.

  9. Mix. Knead the dough.

  10. Adjust water to achieve the desired amount of dough.

Bake

  1. Bake as you would for 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.

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. Sugar + flourtop 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

Mashed potatoes
Add moisture and starch that help the dough stay soft and hold gas during rising.
Yeast foam
Ferments the sugars and produces gas that makes the dough rise.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the bread its structure.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a little sweetness and browning.

The step that matters

Let the sponge rise overnight. Yeast needs time and warmth to ferment the starch and sugars. Too cold or too short a rise leaves the dough dense, so the sponge should be allowed to fully develop.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. 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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