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Bread

Yeast for Bread

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

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 ↓

Yeast for Bread

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Grate the potatoes and let the water drip off.

  2. Mix the grated potatoes with flour and sugar.

  3. Boil the hops in water for 20 minutes, then pour over the potato mixture.

  4. Add warm water and yeast, and let it rise.

  5. Once risen, stir in the salt.

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. Flour + hopstop 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

Raw potatoes
Provide starch and moisture that feed the yeast as the starter ferments.
Flour
Forms the body of the starter, giving the yeast starch to work on.
Sugar
Provides quick food for the yeast, speeding up fermentation and rising.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars and produces gas that makes the starter rise.

The step that matters

Once risen, stir in the salt.. Salt slows yeast activity, so adding it before the starter has risen can weaken fermentation. Waiting until after the rise lets the yeast work first.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, hops. 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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