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Country Yeast

A simple yeast starter made by boiling hops, mixing with flour, salt, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Hops and flour work together. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10 recipes. Both carry eugenol, which smells clove, spicy. The science ↓

Country Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hop liquid

  1. Boil the hops in 3 pints of water for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the liquid over the flour and stir until the flour is moistened.

Cool and add the yeast

  1. Add the salt and let the mixture cool to blood-warm.

  2. Stir in the lively yeast and mix well.

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

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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 that flavour the liquid.
Flour
Gives the yeast starches to feed on and adds body to the mixture.
Lively yeast
Ferments the mixture, producing gas that leavens the bread.

The step that matters

Cooling to blood-warm before adding the yeast. Yeast is a living organism. If the liquid is too hot, the heat can kill the cells, so the mixture will not ferment. If it is too cool, fermentation will be slow. Blood-warm is gentle enough for the yeast to survive and start working.

“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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