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Hop Yeast

A yeast mixture made with hops, potatoes, flour, salt, sugar, ginger, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and ginger work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 992 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Hop Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Tie the hops in a coarse muslin bag and boil in 2 quarts of water.

  2. Grate the potatoes and pour 1 quart of the boiling hop water over them to form a starch.

Make the yeast

  1. Add the flour, salt, sugar, and ginger; stir thoroughly and let cool until lukewarm.

  2. Add 3 tablespoons of good yeast and set in a warm place to rise for 3 to 4 hours until light and spongy.

  3. Transfer the yeast to a corked jug and store in a cool 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.

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 + gingertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together992 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Grated potato starch gives the yeast body and feeds the fermentation.
Hops
Boiled hop water adds bitterness and aroma and helps preserve the yeast.
Yeast
Live yeast from the previous batch leavens the mixture and makes it rise and turn spongy.
Sugar
Sugar provides food for the yeast, speeding up fermentation.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool until lukewarm before adding the yeast. Yeast cells are killed by very hot liquid. If the mixture is still hot when the yeast goes in, it may not rise, so cooling to lukewarm protects the culture.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, flour, sugar, ginger. 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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