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Potato Yeast

A yeast starter made by boiling potatoes in hop water, then adding salt, sugar, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Potato Yeast

Why it works: Potato and bread work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 434 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Potato Yeast

1 teacup for about 4 loaves of bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil a good handful of hops in 1 quart of water.

  2. Pour the hot hop water over 2 teacups of grated potatoes and stir until it just comes to a boil.

  3. Add ¼ teacup of coarse sea salt and ½ teacup of sugar, then let the mixture cool.

Start and store

  1. Once cool, add the usual amount of good yeast to start it.

  2. When raised, transfer to a jar, cover closely, and set in a clean place.

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 + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together434 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  2. Potato + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + breadtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide starch and body that feed the yeast and thicken the starter.
Sugar
Gives the yeast a quick food source to activate and grow.
Good yeast
Its live cultures ferment the mixture and make it rise.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding yeast. Yeast is killed or weakened by high heat, so the hot potato liquid must cool before the yeast goes in.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, bread. 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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