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Bread

Milk Yeast Fob Batteb Bbead

A yeast starter made from warm water, sweet milk, flour, hop tea and mashed Irish potatoes, used to make bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,611 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Milk Yeast Fob Batteb Bbead

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. In a bowl, stir together warm water, sweet milk, and salt.

  2. Add flour gradually to make a thin batter.

  3. Cover and place in a warm spot in winter or in the sun in summer. Stir occasionally until the mixture rises well.

  4. At 11 or 12 o'clock, use this mixture to make bread.

Make the hop tea

  1. Boil hops in water for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the hop tea and cool it to the warmth of new milk.

  3. Add a small handful of salt and sugar to the hop tea.

  4. Mix flour with a little hop tea until smooth.

  5. Combine the flour mixture with the rest of the hop tea.

  6. Let it stand until Wednesday.

Add potatoes and store

  1. Boil the Irish potatoes. Mash the Irish potatoes.

  2. Stir the potatoes into the mixture.

  3. Strain the mixture.

  4. Store in jugs or bottles 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. Milk + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Forms the batter and bulk of the starter that ferments and gives the loaf its structure.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma to the tea and helps preserve the liquid.
Irish potatoes
Add starch and moisture to the mixture, feeding the yeast and adding body.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast, driving fermentation and rising.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits about as well
  2. Potatothe original
  3. Mustardfits about as well
  4. Parsnipfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, 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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