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Dessert

Dry Yeast

A dough made from boiled potatoes, hops, flour, and yeast, rolled and cut into cakes to dry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,355 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Dry Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes and hops

  1. Wash the potatoes and boil them without peeling.

  2. Boil the hops with the potatoes until done.

Make the dough

  1. Peel and mash the potatoes, then mix with 1 pint of flour.

  2. Strain the water from the hops into the potato mixture.

  3. When cool, stir in the soaked yeast and let it rise for 24 hours.

Shape and dry

  1. Mix in Indian meal, roll out the dough, and cut it into cakes to dry.

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 + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  3. Potato + hopstop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide the bulk and starch that give the dough body and hold it together.
Flour
Adds structure to the mashed potato so the dough can be rolled and cut.
Dry yeast
Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes it rise and gives it flavour.
Hops
Contribute bitterness and aroma to the liquid that goes into the dough.

The step that matters

Add the yeast only when the mixture is cool. Yeast is killed by high heat, so stirring it into a hot potato and hop mixture can stop the dough from rising. Waiting until it is cool lets the yeast stay alive and ferment during the 24-hour rise.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (hops, flour):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, flour. 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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