Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and 92,116 recipes mention both. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓
How to Make Yeast, No. I
Ingredients
Directions
Make the hop infusion
Steep hops in boiling water for 5 minutes.
Strain the infusion over flour, stirring to a smooth paste with a little cold water.
Mix well and boil for 1 minute.
Finish and ferment
Add salt and sugar, then let cool to lukewarm.
Stir in yeast and let stand for 24 hours, stirring occasionally.
Cover closely and set in a cool place.
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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.
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Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsAroma overlapmoderateMentioned together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
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Hops + flourtop 32% of all pairsAroma overlaplowMentioned together10 recipes
Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).
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Hops + sugartop 43% of all pairsAroma overlaplowMentioned 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
- Hops
- Add bitterness and aroma that flavour the starter.
- Flour
- Provides starch that thickens the mixture into a paste and feeds the yeast.
- Sugar
- Gives the yeast an easily used food source for fermentation.
- Yeast
- Ferments the sugars, producing gas that leavens the starter.
The step that matters
Let cool to lukewarm before adding yeast. Boiling-hot liquid kills yeast cells, so the mixture must cool to a lukewarm temperature before the yeast is stirred in to stay alive and active.
“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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