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Receipt for Yeast

A yeast starter made with hops, water, flour, mashed potato, sugar, salt, ginger, 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 ↓

Receipt for Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hop water

  1. Boil dried hops in boiling water for 10 minutes.

  2. Strain the hot water onto the flour to make a thick batter.

Build the starter

  1. Add the soft mashed potato to the mixture and stir well.

  2. When lukewarm, add brown sugar, salt, ginger, and yeast; mix thoroughly.

  3. Cover the mixture and let it rise in a warm place, stirring occasionally.

  4. Once it stops rising, transfer to a glass jar or stone crock, leaving space at the top.

  5. Store in a cool, dry place; it will keep for three weeks.

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. Flour + potatotop 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

Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing gas that makes the starter rise and become active.
Flour
Forms the thick batter that gives the starter its body and food for the yeast.
Dried hops
Adds bitterness and aroma, and helps preserve the starter.
Brown sugar
Feeds the yeast, supplying the sugar it ferments.
Mashed potato
Adds starch and moisture that the yeast can work on.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast when the mixture is lukewarm. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must have cooled to lukewarm before the yeast goes in. Too hot and the yeast will not activate and the starter will fail to rise.

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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