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Dessert

Yeast for Cakes of Leaven

A yeast preparation made from hops, potatoes, flour, and yeast for leavening cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Yeast for Cakes of Leaven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Boil hops and potatoes in 3 quarts of water until reduced to 1½ quarts.

  2. Strain the hot mixture over ½ gallon of sifted flour and stir well.

  3. When cool, add ½ pint of yeast or 1 yeast cake and let it rise in a bucket.

  4. Once very light and porous, shape into small thin cakes with cornmeal.

Dry and store

  1. Place cakes on a board to dry, turning them daily.

  2. After drying, store in a thin bag in a cool, airy place.

Use

  1. To use, dissolve 1 cake in 1 quart of flour with a teacup of cold water and 1 teaspoon of sugar.

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).

  4. Hops + flourtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  5. Hops + potatotop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Hops
Adds bitter and aromatic compounds that help flavor the yeast mixture.
Potatoes
Their starch and liquid feed the yeast and give the batter body.
Sifted flour
Provides the starch and structure that the yeast grows within.
Yeast
Ferments the mixture, producing gas that makes it rise and become light and porous.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast so it becomes active when the cake is used.

The step that matters

Letting the mixture rise until very light and porous. Yeast must be given enough time to ferment and fill the batter with gas. Shaping too early leaves a dense cake that will not raise well later.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, 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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