Skip to main content
Preserve

Yeast Without Hops

A mixture of grated potatoes, water, yeast, sugar, and salt boiled and cooled to produce a yeast starter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Potato and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Yeast Without Hops

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Add the grated potatoes to the boiling water.

  2. Boil for 5 minutes.

  3. Remove from heat and let cool slightly before using.

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 + 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

Potatoes
Cooked starch gives the starter body and moisture.
Yeast
Ferments sugars and produces gas that makes dough rise.
Brown sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and molasses flavor.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool slightly before using. Yeast is a living organism. If the mixture is still very hot when it is used, the heat can kill the yeast, so the starter will not ferment and rise properly.

“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.

You might also like