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Flour and Water Yeast

A homemade yeast made by boiling sugar, salt, water, and flour, then cooling and bottling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,373 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Flour and Water Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the yeast

  1. Mix the sugar and salt into the cold water.

  2. Slowly bring the mixture to a boil, stirring in the flour as it heats.

  3. Allow it to boil for one hour, then remove from heat and let cool.

Store and use

  1. Once cool, bottle the mixture.

  2. Use ½ pint of this yeast to raise 9 lb of flour.

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. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + wheattop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,071 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

Wheat flour
Forms the thickened base that the yeast grows in and gives the mixture body.
Raw sugar
Feeds the fermenting yeast, which produces gas and acidity that help raise dough.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour in while heating. Adding flour to hot water while stirring keeps it from clumping and scorching, so the base cooks evenly and stays smooth. Cooking the flour also breaks down its starch, which helps the mixture thicken and become a better medium for fermentation.

“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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