Skip to main content
Bread

Hop Yeast

A potato-based bread made with hops, flour, sugar, salt, and yeast.

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

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 ↓

Hop Yeast

Oven, in the book's wordsA warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the potatoes and boil them in 3 quarts of water with the hops until soft.

  2. Mash the potatoes in a wide-mouthed jar until fine.

Make the starter

  1. Add the flour, sugar, and salt to the mashed potatoes.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the mixture and stir until smooth.

  3. Let it cool to lukewarm, then add the yeast.

  4. Let it sit in a warm place for 24 hours, then cover and store in a cool place.

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. Potato + hopstop 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

Potatoes
Break down into a starchy mash that thickens the liquid and feeds the yeast.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma, and help preserve the liquid.
Flour
Adds starch and body, thickening the mixture into a batter-like starter.
Sugar
Provides food for the yeast, driving fermentation and gas production.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing carbon dioxide that leavens the bread.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast to lukewarm liquid. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must cool to lukewarm before yeast goes in. Too hot and the fermentation will fail to start.

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.

You might also like

Potato BreadPotato Bread124 recipesCornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipes