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To Make Yeast

A homemade yeast starter made by boiling water, adding flour, sugar, and fresh yeast, then fermenting for 24 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

To Make Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Boil 2 quarts of water for 30 minutes, thickening with 3 tablespoons of flour and sweetening with ½ pound of brown sugar.

  2. Let the mixture cool almost completely, then pour it into a jug.

  3. Add 4 tablespoons of fresh yeast and shake well.

  4. Let it stand uncovered near a warm place for 24 hours to ferment.

Finish and store

  1. After fermentation, pour off the thin liquor on top, shake the remainder, and cork it for use.

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

Fresh yeast
Provides the microbes that ferment the sugar, producing gas and flavour in the starter.
Brown sugar
Feeds the yeast, supplying the sugar it ferments and adding molasses sweetness.
Fine flour
Thickens the boiled liquid and gives the yeast starches to work on.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool almost completely before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by high heat, so adding it to very hot liquid can stop fermentation before it starts. Cooling to near body warmth lets the yeast survive and multiply.

“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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