Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓
Sop Yeast
Ingredients
Directions
Make the hop batter
Pour boiling water over fresh hops and boil until the water is strong with hop flavor.
Strain the hop water over sifted flour to make a batter, not too thin.
Let the batter cool.
Add yeast and rise
If you have a quart of batter, add ½ cup white sugar, 1 tablespoon salt, and 1 cup fresh yeast.
Set the mixture aside to rise.
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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Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
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Hops + flourtop 32% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together10 recipes
Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).
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Hops + sugartop 43% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together6 recipes
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
- Fresh hops
- Provide the hop flavor that is infused into the boiling water.
- Sifted flour
- Forms the batter that the yeast will work in and rise.
- Fresh yeast
- Produces gas as it ferments, causing the batter to rise.
- White sugar
- Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness to the bread.
The step that matters
Let the batter cool before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed or slowed by high heat, so the batter must cool before the yeast goes in, or the rise will fail.
“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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