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Home-made Yeast

A yeast starter made by boiling potatoes with hops, mixing with flour batter, adding sugar, ginger, salt, and yeast, then letting rise.

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

Prepare the base

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

  2. Tie the hops in a small muslin bag and boil with the potatoes.

  3. Drain the water onto 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.

Make the starter

  1. Add the mashed potatoes, sugar, ginger, salt, and yeast.

  2. Let the mixture stand in a warm place until it has risen.

Store

  1. Transfer to a large, scalded jug and cork tightly.

  2. Store the jug 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
Supply starch and body that feed the yeast and give the starter its thickness.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma while helping preserve the starter against spoilage.
Flour
Forms the thin batter that gives the yeast a starch base to work on.
Sugar
Provides quick food for the yeast so it becomes active and rises.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars and starches, producing gas that makes the mixture rise.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand in a warm place until it has risen. Yeast works best in warmth, so the mixture needs a warm spot to ferment and rise. Too cold and it stays flat; too hot and the yeast can be killed.

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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