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Self-working Yeast

A yeast starter made with hops, flour, sugar, salt, and potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Self-working Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hop water

  1. Tie the hops in a coarse muslin bag and boil in 4 quarts of water for 1 hour.

Make the batter

  1. Wet the flour with the hop water, then add the sugar and salt, and mix well.

  2. Cover the bowl with a thin cloth and let it sit in a warm place for 2 days.

  3. On the third day, peel, boil, and mash the potatoes, then stir them into the batter.

  4. Let the mixture sit in a warm kitchen for 12 hours before transferring it to clean jars.

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).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  5. 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

Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma, and helps preserve the starter against spoilage.
Potatoes
Supply starch and moisture that feed the wild yeast and bacteria as the starter ferments.
Flour
Provides starch that the yeast and bacteria break down, forming the body of the starter.
White sugar
Gives the yeast an easily used food source, driving fermentation and gas production.

The step that matters

Let the mixture sit in a warm kitchen for 12 hours before transferring it to clean jars.. Warm conditions let the yeast become active and build up gas and flavor; cooler temperatures slow fermentation, and jars that are not clean invite unwanted microbes.

Swap the potato

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

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

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