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Hop and Potato Yeast

Yeast produced by boiling potatoes with hops, then adding sugar, ginger, salt, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 and Potato Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the potato mixture

  1. Pare and slice the potatoes, then boil them in water with the hops tied in a muslin rag.

  2. Once the potatoes are soft, remove the hops and press the potatoes through a colander.

Add yeast and store

  1. Add sugar, ginger, salt, and yeast to the potato mixture when it is blood-warm.

  2. Store the yeast in a stone or earthenware jar with a well-fitting plate on top.

  3. Scald the jar before making new yeast.

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. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Hops + gingertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  5. Potato + hopstop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

Potatoes
Supply starch and body, giving the yeast a thick, bready base to work in.
Hops
Add bitter, aromatic flavour and help keep the yeast mixture from spoiling.
White sugar
Provides readily fermentable sugar that the yeast converts into carbon dioxide.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing carbon dioxide that makes the mixture rise and turn frothy.
Ginger
Adds a warm, spicy aroma and flavour to the finished yeast.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast at blood-warm. Yeast is killed by high heat, so a mixture that is too hot will fail to ferment. If it is too cold, fermentation slows and the yeast becomes sluggish. Blood-warm is a gentle middle point that keeps the yeast alive and active.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (hops, sugar, ginger):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, 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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