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Hop Yeast

A yeast mixture made by boiling hops, mixing with flour, adding mashed potatoes, and fermenting.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,355 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Hop Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hop tea

  1. Boil the hops in water until the strength is extracted.

Make the batter

  1. Rub the flour smooth with cold water.

  2. Strain the hop tea and mix it with the flour mixture.

  3. Cook slowly for 5 to 10 minutes.

Add the yeast and rise

  1. Let the mixture cool, then add the yeast and mashed potatoes.

  2. Transfer to a stone jug or bottles 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 + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  3. 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
Provide bitterness and aroma that flavour the liquid and help preserve it.
Flour
Thickens the liquid when cooked, giving the mixture body.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the liquid, producing carbon dioxide that makes it rise.
Potatoes
Add starch and body, and give the yeast a food source to work on.

The step that matters

Cook slowly for 5 to 10 minutes. Gentle heat thickens the flour mixture smoothly without scorching or lumping. Cooling fully before adding yeast matters because hot liquid kills live yeast cells.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, flour. 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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