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Hop Yeast

A yeast starter made by boiling hops, mixing with mashed potatoes, flour, and spices, then allowing it to rise.

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 ↓

Hop Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hop water

  1. Boil the hops in 3 pints of water.

Make the starter

  1. Mash the potatoes very fine in a crock.

  2. Pour the boiling hop water over the mashed potatoes and flour, mixing well.

  3. Let the mixture cool until it is milkwarm.

  4. Add yeast to make it rise.

  5. Wait until the mixture gets light.

  6. Stir in warm water, brown sugar, ginger, and salt.

  7. Let the mixture rise and fall several times before storing for use.

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

Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma to the liquid, and helps preserve the starter.
Potatoes
Provide starch that feeds the yeast and gives the starter body.
Flour
Thickens the mash and supplies more starch for the yeast to ferment.
Brown sugar
Gives the yeast a quick food source, speeding fermentation and adding sweetness.
Yeast (in the method)
Ferments the sugars and starches, producing gas that makes the mixture rise and turn light.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool until it is milkwarm. Boiling hop water would kill the yeast when it is added. Cooling to milkwarm keeps the yeast alive and active so the starter can rise.

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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