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Bread

Railroad Yeast

A yeast starter made from middlings, salt, ginger, baking soda, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour 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 ↓

Railroad Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Mix the middlings, salt, ginger, baking soda, and sugar together.

  2. Scald the mixture with boiling water and let it rise for 12 hours in a warm place until light.

  3. Store the yeast in a cool place; it will keep for two weeks.

Make the batter and bake

  1. To make the batter, combine warm water, a pinch of salt, and enough flour to create a thin batter.

  2. Add 1 teaspoon of the railroad yeast to the batter and let it rise before using it for bread.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Ginger + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

Ginger and sugar 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

Middlings
Provides the starchy base that the yeast works through as the mixture rises.
Railroad yeast
Produces gas that makes the batter rise and turn light.
Baking soda
Reacts with the mixture to add lift and help it rise.
Flour
Forms the thin batter that the yeast raises into bread dough.

The step that matters

Scalding the mixture with boiling water. Boiling water must be added to the dry mix so the starches gelatinize and the mixture becomes a workable base; cooling it with too little care could affect how well the yeast develops.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. 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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