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Hop Yeast

A yeast mixture made from potatoes, hops, water, flour, and hop yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,355 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Hop Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hops

  1. Peel the potatoes and set aside.

  2. Place the hops in a bag and add to 2 quarts of water in a pot. Boil the water, ensuring the bag stays submerged.

Make the yeast

  1. Once the potatoes are cooked, have some flour ready in your yeast dish.

  2. Pour the boiling hop water over the flour.

  3. Mash the potatoes finely and let them cool slightly.

  4. Add a little hop yeast to the cooled mixture.

  5. Keep the mixture warm until it rises, then store it in a cool place.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  3. Potato + hopstop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide starch that feeds the yeast and gives the mixture body.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma, and help preserve the brew.
Hop yeast
Ferments the sugars, causing the mixture to rise.
Flour
Adds starch and body to the mixture.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool slightly before adding the hop yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must be cool enough that it will not harm the live culture before it is added.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, flour. 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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