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Home-made Yeast

A liquid yeast starter made by boiling water, potatoes, and hops, then adding flour, ginger, sugar, and prepared yeast.

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

Home-made Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Boil water, sliced potatoes, and hops together for 15 minutes.

  2. Pour the mixture through a colander into a pan.

  3. Stir in flour until the mixture is the thickness of thin batter.

Add the yeast and rise

  1. Once cool, add ginger and sugar, then mix well.

  2. Add prepared yeast and mix thoroughly.

  3. Transfer to a jar and set aside to rise.

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 + gingertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together992 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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

Prepared yeast
Ferments the sugars to produce gas, which makes the liquid rise and turns it into a leavening starter.
Hops
Adds bitter flavour and aroma and helps preserve the liquid.
Sugar
Provides food for the yeast to ferment, driving activity and gas production.
Flour
Thickens the boiled liquid to a thin batter consistency.
Raw potatoes
Release starch and sugars during boiling that give the mixture body and food for yeast.

The step that matters

Add the yeast only once the mixture has cooled. Yeast is killed or weakened by hot liquid, so the mixture must be cool before the prepared yeast is added to keep it active and able to ferment.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, flour, ginger, 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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