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Potato Yeast

A fermented potato mash with hops, sugar, salt, ginger, and yeast used as a starter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Potato Yeast

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 ↓

Potato Yeast

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hop water

  1. Boil the hops in a sack in the water for 15 minutes.

Cook the potato mixture

  1. Remove the sack with hops and add the grated potatoes, sugar, salt, and ginger.

  2. Stir occasionally and cook for 5 to 10 minutes until thick like starch.

Cool and add yeast

  1. Turn the mixture into a jar and let it cool to tepid in summer or warm in winter.

  2. Add the yeast when the mixture is at the right temperature.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

Potatoes
Grated potato thickens the mixture as it cooks and supplies starch for the yeast to feed on.
Yeast
Live yeast ferments the sugars and starches, producing the leavening action of the starter.
White sugar
Provides readily available sugar that the yeast consumes to become active.
Hops
Hops add bitter and aromatic flavour and help preserve the liquid.

The step that matters

Add the yeast at the right temperature. Yeast is killed by high heat and works slowly when cold. Adding it only once the mixture is tepid or warm keeps the cells alive and active, so the starter ferments properly.

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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