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Feach-leaf Yeast

A dough made with mashed potatoes, flour, and a peach-leaf infusion, then fermented with yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and potato share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 71 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Feach-leaf Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the peach-leaf tea

  1. Boil the peach leaves and potatoes in 2 quarts of water until the potatoes are done.

  2. Remove the leaves and discard them.

Make the dough

  1. Peel and mash the potatoes, then mix with 1 pint of flour.

  2. Add enough water to form a paste.

  3. Pour the hot peach-leaf tea over the mixture and scald for 5 minutes.

  4. Stir in ½ cup of old yeast and let it sit for a few hours.

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. Peach + potatotop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together71 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Peach + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together787 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Peach leaves
Steeped in the boiling water to flavor the tea that the dough is made with.
Potatoes
Their starch and mashed body thicken the mixture and give it a soft, moist texture.
Flour
Its starch and proteins form the paste and give the bread its structure.
Old yeast
Its living cells produce gas that makes the mixture rise during the long rest.

The step that matters

Stirring in the yeast after scalding. Yeast cells are damaged or killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must be cooled enough before the yeast goes in. If it is too hot, the dough will not rise well.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, 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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