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Drink

Yeast and Bread

A fermented beverage made from boiled potatoes, hops, flour, sugar, ginger, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Yeast and Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes and hops

  1. Peel the potatoes and place them in a kettle with 3 quarts of water.

  2. Put 1 pint of hops in a thin muslin bag in the kettle with the potatoes.

  3. Boil until the potatoes are soft.

Make the mash

  1. Pour the boiling water over 1 pint of flour in a crock.

  2. Squeeze the hops to extract their flavor and mash the potatoes.

  3. Add 1 quart of cold water to the mashed potatoes and strain through a colander into the crock.

  4. Add ½ teacup of coarse sea salt, 1 cup of sugar, and 1 tablespoon of ginger.

Ferment and store

  1. Let the mixture stand for 2 days until it stops fermenting and settles.

  2. Transfer to a jug, cork tightly, 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. 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. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

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
Provide starch and body, the bulk of the brew.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness.
Flour
Adds starch that can ferment and thicken the liquid.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast, driving fermentation and producing alcohol.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand until it stops fermenting. Fermentation needs time for yeast to convert sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Stopping too early leaves sugar unfermented and the brew sweet and unstable, while sealing it before fermentation ends can build pressure in the jug.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, flour, 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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