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Bread and Breakfast Cakes. Yeast.

A yeast-leavened bread cake made with potatoes, hops, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Bread and Breakfast Cakes. Yeast.

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Boil 2 quarts of water with 2 tablespoons of hops.

  2. Strain the boiling water over the grated potatoes and stir well.

  3. Boil the mixture once more.

  4. Add ½ cup of sugar and ¼ cup of coarse sea salt.

  5. Let the mixture cool to blood-warm, then add 1 cup of yeast.

Rise and store

  1. Allow it to rise in a warm place for 5 to 6 hours.

  2. Once well-risen, transfer to a stone jug.

  3. Cork the jug tightly and store it in a cool place.

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 + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Hops + potatotop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Hops + sugartop 43% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Supply starch and moisture that feed the yeast and give the mixture body.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars and produces gas, making the mixture rise.
Sugar
Provides food for the yeast, speeding fermentation and adding mild sweetness.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma and helps preserve the liquid.

The step that matters

Cool to blood-warm before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must cool to about body temperature before the yeast goes in. Too hot and it will not rise; the warm rise that follows then depends on live yeast working in gentle heat.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Cucumberfits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, sugar. 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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