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Bread

Grandma's Hop Yeast

A yeast bread flavored with hops, potatoes, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and coffee work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 167 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Grandma's Hop Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hops and potatoes

  1. Place hops in a sack and boil in 2 quarts of water for 10 minutes.

  2. Peel and steam the potatoes until tender.

  3. Mash the potatoes.

Make the dough

  1. Pour the boiling water over 2 quarts of flour in a large pan.

  2. Stir the mashed potatoes into the flour mixture while hot.

  3. When the mixture is milk-warm, add ½ teacup of sugar, ½ teacup of coarse sea salt, and 1 coffee cup of baker's yeast.

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 + coffeetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together167 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + coffeetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

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

  5. Flour + coffeetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,141 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Hops
Flavours the bread and contributes bitterness and aroma, and their boiled liquid is used to mix the dough.
Potatoes
Add starch and moisture, helping the dough stay soft and tender.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a little sweetness and browning.
Baker's yeast
Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes the bread rise.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast at milk-warm temperature. Yeast works best at lukewarm temperatures. If the mixture is too hot it can kill the yeast, and if it is too cold the dough will rise slowly, so the mixture should be checked before the yeast goes in.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Potatothe original
  4. Capsicumfits about as well

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