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Bread

Potato Bread

A loaf made from mashed potato, flour, yeast, salt, sugar, and water, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Potato Bread

Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Potato Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potato

  1. Boil the potato in its skin.

  2. Drain, dry, peel, and mash the potato.

  3. Add salt and sugar to the mashed potato.

Make the dough

  1. Blend the yeast in the reserved water from the potatoes.

  2. Beat the yeast mixture into the mashed potato.

  3. Knead in the flour to form a stiff dough.

  4. Shape the dough into a loaf.

  5. Let the loaf rise until light.

Bake

  1. Bake for 50 minutes to 1 hour.

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.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Potato
Adds moisture and starch, giving the bread a soft, tender crumb.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure.
Yeast
Ferments sugars to produce gas that makes the loaf rise.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a little sweetness and browning.

The step that matters

Let the loaf rise until light. Yeast needs time and warmth to produce enough gas to lighten the dough. Rising too short leaves a dense loaf, while the dough should be properly risen before baking to get good volume.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, 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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