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Bread

Wheat and Sweet Potato Bread

A wheat bread made with mashed sweet potatoes and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Flour and sweet potato work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 627 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Wheat and Sweet Potato Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the dough

  1. Boil the sweet potatoes until they are tender but not watery.

  2. Mash the sweet potatoes and pass them through a sieve to achieve a smooth pulp.

  3. Combine the sweet potato pulp with the flour in a large bowl.

  4. Add water gradually until a dough forms.

  5. Knead the dough until smooth and elastic.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough into a loaf and place it in a greased loaf pan.

  2. Let the dough rise until doubled in size.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for about 30-40 minutes or until golden brown.

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 + sweet potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together627 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

All-purpose flour
Provides the gluten network that gives the bread its structure and chew.
Sweet potatoes
Add moisture and sweetness, and a soft, tender crumb.

The step that matters

Add water gradually until a dough forms. Flour absorbs liquid at different rates depending on moisture in the sweet potato pulp. Adding water slowly lets you stop at the right dough consistency, avoiding a sticky or stiff dough that would bake up dense.

“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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