Name: Potato Yeast
Ingredients: 6 potatoes; ½ cup flour; water (as needed); ⅓ cup yeast; ¼ cup coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')

Why it works: Potato and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,355 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Potato Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Boil and mash the potatoes.
Mix the mashed potatoes with flour and enough water to make a thick batter.
Stir in the yeast and coarse sea salt.
Cover the mixture and let it rise in a jar.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,355 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

Potatoes: Mashed potatoes add starch and moisture that give the dough body.
Flour: Flour provides proteins and starch that build structure in the dough.
Yeast: Yeast ferments sugars and releases gas, which makes the dough rise.

“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.