Why it works: Flour and hops 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 ↓
Barm, to Make
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Dissolve isinglass in warm water and mix with flour.
Boil hops in water until reduced by half.
Combine and ferment
Combine all ingredients in a large bowl.
Place in a warm area for two days.
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.
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Flour + hopstop 32% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- Brewer's barm
- Its yeast cultures start the fermentation that makes the barm active.
- Hops
- Boiling hops adds bitterness and aroma and helps preserve the liquid.
- All-purpose flour
- Its starch provides food for the yeast during fermentation and gives the mixture body.
The step that matters
Boil the hops until reduced by half. Boiling extracts bitterness and aroma from the hops and concentrates them. Reducing the liquid by half sets the strength of the flavour and the preservative effect before the mixture is combined and fermented.
“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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