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Receipts for Making Yeast

A method for producing yeast by fermenting a wheat flour dough with brewer's wort and hops.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and hops 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 ↓

Receipts for Making Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. Mix flour with enough water to form a thick paste.

  2. Cover slightly and place in a warm spot for 3 days.

  3. After 3 days, a sour odor will develop; wait until the smell changes and gas increases, about 6-7 days.

Make the wort and combine

  1. Prepare brewer's wort by boiling with hops and cool to 90°F (32°C).

  2. Thoroughly mix the altered dough with a little lukewarm water and add to the cooled wort.

Ferment

  1. Keep the mixture warm; active fermentation will start after a few hours.

  2. Once fermentation is complete and the liquid is clear, yeast will settle at the bottom.

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 + hopstop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  2. Flour + worttop 35% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Wort + hopstop 49% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together0 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Wheaten flour
Provides starch and nutrients that the wild microbes in the dough feed on during souring.
Brewer's wort
Supplies sugars that the yeast ferments once it is added to the cooled liquid.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma to the wort and helps discourage unwanted bacteria.

The step that matters

Cooling the wort to 90°F (32°C) before adding the dough. Adding the dough to hot wort would kill the live culture in it. Cooling to a warm but safe temperature lets the yeast survive and start fermenting.

“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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