Skip to main content
Drink

Norfolk Yeast

A yeast preparation made by boiling water with hops, mixing with flour, yeast, and pearl ash.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Norfolk Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hop liquid

  1. Boil 2 quarts of water and add a large handful of hops; let boil for 20 minutes.

  2. Strain the liquid from the hops.

  3. Pour half of the liquid over the hops.

  4. Let the other half of the liquid cool.

Make the yeast mixture

  1. Sift 1½ lbs of flour into a pan.

  2. Gradually pour the cooled liquid into the flour. Mix well.

  3. Stir in 1 large teacup of good yeast.

Bottle and finish

  1. Bottle the mixture.

  2. Cork the bottle tightly.

  3. Add 1 teaspoon of pearl ash to each bottle.

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
Add bitterness and aroma to the liquid, and help preserve it.
Flour
Forms the thick body that the yeast works through.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the liquid, producing gas that makes the mixture rise and fizz.
Pearl ash
Acts as a raising agent, releasing gas that helps the mixture lighten.

The step that matters

Let the other half of the liquid cool before adding it to the flour. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the liquid must be cool enough not to harm it before it is stirred in.

“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.

You might also like

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes