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Potato Yeast Without Hops

A yeast-based beverage made from mashed potatoes, flour, water, sugar, salt, and yeast, left to rise and settle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Potato Yeast Without Hops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potato base

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender, then mash them finely.

  2. Mix the mashed potatoes with the flour and boiling water until well combined.

  3. Add the sugar, salt, and cold water; stir until lukewarm.

Ferment and settle

  1. Soak the yeast cake in 2 tablespoons of water, then add it to the mixture.

  2. Let the mixture rise until very light, then pour it through a colander into a jug.

  3. Leave the jug uncorked for 2-3 days to settle, shaking well before each use.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide starch that the yeast converts into sugars and alcohol, and body to the drink.
Flour
Adds more starch for fermentation and helps thicken the mixture.
White sugar
Feeds the yeast, producing carbon dioxide and alcohol during fermentation.
Yeast cake
Converts sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, driving the fermentation and rising.

The step that matters

Let the mixture rise until very light. The yeast needs warm, sugary conditions to ferment properly. If the mixture is too hot or cold, or rises too briefly, fermentation stays weak and the drink lacks lift and flavour.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar. 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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