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Bread

Manitoba White Bread

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

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 ↓

Manitoba White Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix the flour, sugar, and salt in a large bowl.

  2. Add the mashed potatoes and pour in 2 quarts of boiling water.

  3. When the mixture is lukewarm, dissolve the yeast cake in lukewarm water and add it to the mixture.

  4. Let the dough rise in a moderately warm place until light, usually overnight.

  5. Add 3 measures of flour for every 1 measure of water.

Shape and bake

  1. Let the dough rise 2 to 3 times, then place it in pans to rise again.

  2. Bake as usual.

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

Potatoes
Add moisture and starch that keep the crumb soft and moist.
Yeast cake
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Flour
Builds the gluten structure that traps gas and holds the loaf's shape.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and browning to the crust.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise until light. Rising develops the gas bubbles and gluten that give the loaf its airy texture. Under-proofed dough bakes dense, while the slow overnight rise needs a moderately warm spot so the yeast stays active.

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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