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Dessert

Flour Yeast

A yeast paste made by cooking flour and water, then adding yeast, sugar, and salt to rise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Flour Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Mix ½ pint of flour with 1 pint of cold water in a saucepan.

  2. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until it thickens into a yeast paste.

Add the yeast and rise

  1. Pour the mixture into a bowl and stir in 1 cup of hop yeast, 2 teaspoons of sugar, and 1 teaspoon of salt.

  2. Set the mixture aside to rise.

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).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Cooked with water to form a thickened paste that gives the starter body.
Hop yeast
Provides the live microorganisms that ferment sugars and produce gas so the mixture rises.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast, giving it fuel to ferment and generate carbon dioxide.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour and water paste. Stirring constantly over medium heat keeps the flour from scorching or forming lumps, and the starch must thicken fully so the paste is smooth before the yeast is added. Adding yeast to a very hot mixture can kill the live cultures.

“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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