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Home-Made Yeast

A homemade yeast starter made by steeping hops, mixing with flour, salt, sugar, and yeast, then fermenting.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Home-Made Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hop infusion

  1. Put the dried hop blossoms or pressed hops into a saucepan.

  2. Pour boiling water over the hops and let simmer for 5 minutes.

Make the paste and thicken

  1. In a separate bowl, mix flour with a little cold water to form a smooth paste.

  2. Strain the boiling hop infusion through a cloth into the flour paste. Stir continuously.

  3. Boil the mixture for a few minutes until it thickens. Stir constantly to avoid lumps.

Cool, add yeast and ferment

  1. Transfer to a large bowl and add salt and sugar.

  2. Let cool to body temperature.

  3. Stir in the lively yeast and mix well.

  4. Cover with a flannel blanket.

  5. Let ferment in a warm place, stirring every few hours for 24 hours.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  3. Hops + sugartop 43% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Lively yeast
Its live cells ferment the sugars, producing gas that leavens and flavors the starter.
Flour
Forms a smooth paste that thickens the starter and gives the yeast material to work on.
White sugar
Provides readily available sugar that the yeast consumes during fermentation.
Dried hop blossoms or pressed hops
Infused into the water to add bitterness and aroma and help preserve the starter.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool to body temperature before adding the yeast. Yeast cells are killed or slowed by very hot liquid, so adding it too early can stop fermentation before it starts.

“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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