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Recipe for Home Made Yeast

A liquid yeast starter made by fermenting grated potatoes, sugar, salt, and yeast cake in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Recipe for Home Made Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Add grated potatoes to boiling water and boil for 5 minutes, stirring constantly.

  2. Cool the mixture, then add sugar, salt, and the yeast cake mixture.

  3. Pour into a stone or glass jar, cover, and let stand in a warm place for at least 3 hours.

Ferment and store

  1. Stir the mixture down each time it reaches the top of the jar until fermentation ceases.

  2. Store in a cool place, covered.

Use

  1. Use ½ cup of this yeast in place of one yeast cake when making bread or biscuits.

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 + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Grated potatoes
Starch that feeds the yeast and thickens the starter body.
Sugar
Food for the yeast, driving fermentation and gas production.
Yeast cake
Live yeast culture that ferments the starter and leavens baked goods.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture down as it rises. Fermentation produces gas that lifts the mixture to the jar top. Stirring it down releases built-up gas and keeps the yeast active, while letting it run until fermentation ceases gives a fully spent, unstable starter that can spoil.

“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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