Why it works: Hops and flour work together. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10 recipes. Both carry eugenol, which smells clove, spicy. The science ↓
Yeast
Ingredients
Directions
Make the hop tea
Pour boiling water over the hops in a kettle and boil for 20 minutes.
Strain the hop tea into a large pitcher.
Make the starter
Slowly pour the hot tea into the flour while stirring gently to avoid lumps.
Beat the mixture until smooth and return it to the rinsed kettle.
Stir over heat until it thickens like starch, adding more boiling water if it becomes too stiff.
Pour back into the bowl and let it cool, stirring occasionally.
When blood-warm, add the yeast and mix well.
Set in a warm place to rise until spongy and frothy.
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.
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Hops + flourtop 32% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together10 recipes
Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Hops
- Provide bitterness and aroma, and their tea gives the starter its flavour.
- Flour
- Thickens the hop tea into a starch base that the yeast can feed on.
- Yeast
- Ferments the starter, producing gas that makes it spongy and frothy.
The step that matters
Adding the yeast at blood-warm. Yeast is killed by excess heat, so the mixture must have cooled to about body temperature before the yeast goes in, otherwise it will not 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.
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