Why it works: Sugar and flour 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 ↓
Magic Yeast
Ingredients
Directions
Make the starter
Stir together brown sugar, flour, and water in a jar.
Add a small piece of leaven or hop yeast to the mixture.
Use and keep it going
Use 2 tablespoons of this yeast for every quart of flour.
Keep the yeast in the jar and replenish with flour, sugar, and water as needed.
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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Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Brown sugar
- Provides sweetness and food that the yeast ferments to produce gas and flavour.
- Flour
- Supplies starch that yeast feeds on and gives the starter body.
- Leaven or hop yeast
- Provides the living microorganisms that ferment the mixture and leaven the dough.
“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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