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Home-made Yeast

A homemade yeast starter made with hops, potatoes, sugar, ginger, salt, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and ginger work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 992 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Home-made Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hop water

  1. Boil the hops in 2 quarts of water for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the hop water through a fine strainer.

Make the starter

  1. Peel, boil, and mash the potatoes very fine.

  2. Mix the strained hop water with the mashed potatoes, sugar, ginger, and salt.

  3. When the mixture is blood-warm, stir in the sweet yeast or dissolved compressed yeast.

  4. Cover the mixture.

  5. Let it sit in a warm room for 5 to 6 hours until it is effervescent.

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 + gingertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together992 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Hops + gingertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Potato + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Hops + potatotop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Hops
Provide the bitter and aromatic flavour that characterises the finished yeast.
Potatoes
Supply starch and body, giving the mixture substance for the yeast to work in.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast, fuelling fermentation and the effervescence that develops.
Sweet yeast or compressed yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing carbon dioxide that makes the mixture effervescent.

The step that matters

Stirring in the yeast at blood-warm temperature. If the mixture is too hot, it can kill the yeast; if too cool, fermentation is slow. Blood-warm is gentle enough for the yeast to survive and begin working.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, sugar, ginger. 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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