Name: Mile Yeast
Ingredients: 1 pint new milk; 1 teaspoon fine salt; 1 large spoon flour

Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Mile Yeast

Ingredients

1 pint new milk
1 teaspoon fine salt
1 large spoon flour

Directions

Make the yeast

Combine the milk, salt, and flour in a bowl and stir well.
Set the mixture in a warm place until it reaches lukewarm temperature, about 1 hour.
If the mixture foams up, it is good to use; if not, discard it.

Use and store

Use twice the amount of this yeast compared to common yeast.
Do not store yeast in a tin vessel.
If the old yeast is sour and you need to use it quickly, add 1 teaspoon of baking soda for every pint of 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.

Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together78,219 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Milk: Provides the liquid and nutrients that the wild yeast and bacteria feed on to start fermenting.
Flour: Supplies starch and proteins that feed the fermenting microbes, helping the yeast culture develop.
Baking soda (in the method): Neutralises the acidity of old, sour yeast so it can be used quickly.

“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.