Skip to main content
Starter

Yeast That Won't Sour

A yeast starter made with hops, flour, salt, sugar, ginger, and yeast, boiled and cooled before adding yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Yeast That Won't Sour

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the hops in water.

  2. In a bowl, mix flour, coarse sea salt, white sugar, and ginger with a little cold water.

  3. Strain the hop water.

  4. Wash out the kettle.

Make the batter

  1. Pour the mixture back into the kettle.

  2. Stir constantly to prevent burning.

  3. Boil thoroughly until thick and smooth.

Jar and set

  1. Ensure the yeast jar is perfectly clean.

  2. Pour the cooked batter into the yeast jar.

  3. Let it cool.

  4. Add the teacup of yeast.

  5. Tie it up tightly.

  6. Set it on the cellar floor.

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 + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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
Adds bitterness and aroma to the hop water that forms the liquid base.
Flour
Cooks into a thick batter that gives the starter body and starch for the yeast.
White sugar
Provides sweetness and a readily used food source for the yeast.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the batter, producing gas that leavens dough.
Ginger
Adds a warm, spicy aroma and flavor to the starter.

The step that matters

Stir constantly while boiling. The flour and sugar mixture sits on the hot base and scorches easily. Scorched starch and sugar taste bitter and can spoil the batch, so keep it moving until thick and smooth.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Jalapenofits better
  3. Gingerthe original
  4. Nutmegfits about as well

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

More yeast starter recipes

Potato 58Homemade 13Hop 9That Will Not Sour 4Bread 3 See all 138 →

You might also like

Deviled OystersDeviled Oysters25 recipes