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American Stock Yeast

A yeast starter made with hops, water, flour, malt, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and malt work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 260 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

American Stock Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 100°F (38°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the hop water

  1. Boil the hops in 60 quarts of water for 20 minutes.

Make the starter

  1. Scald the strong flour with 3 quarts of hop water.

  2. Strain the hop water over the flour and let it cool to 100°F (38°C).

  3. Add the malt and let it sit in the liquid for about 2 hours.

  4. Rub the mixture well with a rolling pin and store it with 4 quarts of Virgin or Stock yeast.

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. Flour + malttop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Hops + flourtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  3. Hops + malttop 49% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1 recipe

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the malt.
Strong flour
Provides starch and protein that feed the yeast and give the starter body.
Malt
Supplies sugars that the yeast ferments, driving activity and flavour.
Virgin or stock yeast
Ferments the sugars in the mixture, producing carbon dioxide and alcohol.

The step that matters

Cooling the hop water to 100°F (38°C). Yeast is sensitive to heat; liquid that is too hot can kill or stress the cells before fermentation starts, while a cooler mixture works too slowly. Checking the temperature before the malt and yeast go in protects the starter's activity.

“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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