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Another Method for Making Yeast

A method for preparing a yeast starter using potato, flour, hop tea, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and tea work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 136 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Another Method for Making Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potato

  1. Peel and boil the potato until soft.

  2. Rub the potato through a sieve.

  3. Mix in an equal amount of flour.

Make the starter

  1. Add hop tea to achieve a liquid consistency.

  2. When slightly warmer than new milk, stir in ½ cup of good yeast.

  3. Cover the mixture closely in a small pitcher.

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 + teatop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together136 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + teatop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together449 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

Potato
Supplies starch and moisture that the yeast can feed on.
Flour
Adds starch for the yeast to feed on and thickens the starter.
Good yeast
Ferments the starch and produces carbon dioxide, which makes the starter rise.

The step that matters

Stirring in the yeast at the right temperature. The mixture should be only slightly warmer than new milk. Yeast is killed by heat, and if the mixture is too cold it ferments slowly or not at all, so the starter may fail.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Beetrootfits about as well
  3. Turnipfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, tea. 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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