Skip to main content
Bread

Dry Yeast

A bread-like cake made with hops, potatoes, flour, and yeast, dusted with cornmeal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and potato 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 ↓

Dry Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Make a strong tea with the hops and strain it over the flour.

  2. Boil the potatoes, mash them, and mix with the flour and hop tea.

  3. When the mixture is cool, add the dissolved yeast.

  4. Let the mixture rise.

Shape and finish

  1. Shape it into cakes and dust with dry cornmeal.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Hops + flourtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Hops
Adds bitter, aromatic flavour to the dough through the strained tea.
Flour
Forms the structure of the dough that holds the bread together.
Potatoes
Add moisture and softness to the dough once mashed.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise.

The step that matters

Let the cooling mixture before adding yeast. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the mixture must be cool before the dissolved yeast goes in. Hot liquid can stop the rise entirely.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, 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.

You might also like

Potato BreadPotato Bread124 recipesCornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipes