Why it works: Hops and flour work together. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10 recipes. Both carry eugenol, which smells clove, spicy. The science ↓
To Make Barm
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the hops
Boil the hops in 1 quart of water until reduced to 1 pint, then strain.
Dissolve the isinglass in warm water.
Make the barm
Mix the flour, dissolved isinglass, and hops mixture in 6 quarts of warm water with a little barm.
Let it stand for 30 hours in a warm place to develop excellent barm.
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.
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Hops + flourtop 32% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together10 recipes
Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Hops
- Add bitterness and aroma, and their boiling reduces the liquid to a concentrated infusion.
- Flour
- Supplies starch that the yeast culture feeds on as the mixture develops.
- Isinglass
- A fining agent that helps clear the liquid by binding suspended particles.
- Barm
- Active yeast culture that starts the fermentation and makes the mixture rise and sour.
The step that matters
Letting it stand 30 hours in a warm place. The fermentation depends on warmth and time for the yeast to multiply. Too cool and it stalls; too hot and unwanted microbes can spoil the culture.
“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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