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Potato Yeast

A dough made by mashing potatoes, adding boiled hops water, flour, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Potato Yeast

Why it works: Potato and flour 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 ↓

Potato Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Oil, steam, and mash a few potatoes.

Make the starter

  1. Pour slowly on boiling water in which a bag of hops has been boiled.

  2. Stir in enough sifted flour to thicken.

  3. When lukewarm, add dissolved compressed yeast or raise with potato or baker's yeast.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Potato + flourtop 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. Potato + hopstop 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

Potatoes
Add starch and moisture that help the dough hold water and stay soft.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma, and their natural preservative qualities help the bread keep.
Sifted flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure and body.
Compressed yeast
Produces carbon dioxide that makes the dough rise and become airy.

The step that matters

Add the yeast only when lukewarm. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must cool to lukewarm before adding it. If it is too hot, the dough will not rise properly.

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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