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Home-made Yeast

A homemade yeast starter made from potatoes, hops, flour, sugar, ginger, salt, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Home-made Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Boil the potatoes in the water until thoroughly cooked.

  2. Add the muslin bag of hops to the boiling potatoes.

  3. Drain the water over enough flour to make a thin batter.

  4. Scald the batter on the stove to cook the flour.

  5. Remove from heat and let cool slightly.

  6. Mash the potatoes and add them to the batter.

  7. Stir in the sugar, ginger, salt, and yeast.

  8. Let the mixture stand in a warm place until it rises.

Store

  1. Transfer to a large jug and cork tightly.

  2. Scald the jug before adding the yeast and store 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 + 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. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

Sugar and ginger 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

Potatoes
Their starch and body thicken the batter and feed the yeast.
Flour
Forms the thin batter's structure once it is scalded and cooked.
Sugar
Provides food for the yeast, helping it grow and rise.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars and starches, causing the mixture to rise and become active.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma and help preserve the starter.

The step that matters

Scald the batter to cook the flour. Flour that is not fully cooked can carry a raw taste and may not give the batter a smooth, stable base. Heating it thoroughly gently cooks the starch so it can serve as food for the yeast.

Swap the potato

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

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

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