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A Good Home-made Yeast

A homemade yeast starter made from potatoes, hops, flour, sugar, salt, and yeast.

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

A Good Home-made Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hop water and potatoes

  1. Boil 2 quarts of water with 3 ounces of hops.

  2. Peel 8 medium potatoes.

  3. Soak the peeled potatoes in the strained hop-water until cooked.

Make the mash

  1. Strain the potato hop-water over 1 quart of flour. Mix well.

  2. Add 1 cup of sugar and 1 ounce of salt. Let it cool.

Add the yeast

  1. Once cool, add 1 cake of compressed yeast or 1 cup of baker's yeast.

  2. Reserve 1 cup of your yeast for the next brewing.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the mixture, producing carbon dioxide and alcohol.
Sugar
Provides readily available sugar that the yeast feeds on during fermentation.
Flour
Supplies starch that breaks down into fermentable sugars, adding body to the mixture.
Potatoes
Add starch that softens and thickens the liquid while contributing fermentable sugars.
Hops
Contribute bitterness and aroma, and help preserve the brew against spoilage.

The step that matters

Add the yeast only once the mixture has cooled. Yeast cells are killed by high heat. Adding yeast to a hot mixture can stop fermentation before it starts, so the liquid must be cool first.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Potatothe original

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.

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