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How to Make Yeast

A yeast starter made from hops, potato, flour, ginger, brown sugar, and baker's yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and ginger work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 992 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

How to Make Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Boil the hops and potato together until the potato is done.

  2. Stir the water from boiling with flour, ginger, and brown sugar until combined.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then add the baker's yeast.

  4. Allow it to stand until well risen, about 5 to 6 hours.

Store and use

  1. Store in a cool place like a cellar.

  2. Use 2 tablespoons of this yeast for biscuits or muffins for one meal, or for two loaves of bread.

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. Potato + gingertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together992 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Baker's yeast
Ferments the mixture, producing gas that makes the starter rise and leaven later bakes.
Potato
Adds starch and moisture that feed the yeast during fermentation.
Flour
Provides starch and sugars for the yeast to consume, forming the starter's body.
Brown sugar
Gives the yeast a quick food source to speed up fermentation.

The step that matters

Allow it to stand until well risen. The yeast needs time to ferment the sugars and starches fully. Cutting the standing time short leaves the starter weak, so it will not leaven bread or muffins well.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, flour, ginger, 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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