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Stock Yeast

A yeast starter made by boiling water with hops, mixing flour and malt, and fermenting with yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and malt work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 260 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Stock Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hops liquid

  1. Boil 3 gallons of water in a clean kettle.

  2. Add 4 oz of hops and boil for 10 to 15 minutes.

Make the mash

  1. In an earthen jar or oak tub, combine 2½ lbs of flour and 1½ lbs of malt.

  2. Strain some boiling liquid from the hops into the flour and malt, and mash to a paste.

  3. Strain the remaining liquid into the mixture and stir well.

Cool, pitch and rise

  1. Let the mixture cool to blood-heat or lukewarm.

  2. Mix in 1 quart of stock or brewers' yeast.

  3. Cover and let rise in a cool place for 30 to 40 hours.

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 + malttop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Hops + flourtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  3. Hops + malttop 49% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1 recipe

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the thick body of the starter and provides starches for the yeast to work on.
Malt
Supplies sugars and enzymes that feed the yeast and add sweetness and flavor.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma and helps preserve the starter against spoilage.
Stock or brewers' yeast
Provides the living yeast cultures that ferment the sugars and make the mixture rise.

The step that matters

Cool to lukewarm before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must cool to about blood-heat before the stock or yeast goes in. Too hot and the culture dies, and the starter will not rise.

“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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