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Bread

A yeast-leavened bread made with mashed potatoes, potato water, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix the hot mashed potatoes with lard, sugar, salt, and warm potato water.

  2. Add flour and yeast, then beat well for five minutes.

  3. Cover and let rise until doubled in size.

Knead and rest

  1. In the evening, gradually add more flour, beating until too stiff to mix.

  2. Knead until firm, then keep warm overnight.

Shape and bake

  1. In the morning, place in buttered pans, let rise, and bake.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

What each ingredient does

Mashed potatoes
Add moisture and starch that keeps the crumb soft and moist.
Flour
Forms the gluten structure that traps gas and gives the loaf its body.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide during fermentation, making the dough rise.
Lard or butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and promotes browning in the crust.

The step that matters

Beating in the flour until too stiff to mix. Gluten develops as flour is worked into the dough. Adding flour gradually and stopping once the dough is too stiff to mix keeps it workable, while kneading until firm builds the structure that holds the rise.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, 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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