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Corn Meal Yeast Cakes

A yeast cake made from cornmeal, flour, hops, and yeast, baked into thin cakes that dry and can be rehydrated for bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,165 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Corn Meal Yeast Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Boil the hops in water until the liquid reduces to 2 quarts.

  2. Strain the liquid into a pan and mix in enough flour to make a thin batter.

  3. Add the yeast and let it ferment.

Shape and dry the cakes

  1. Stir in corn meal to form a stiff dough.

  2. Cover the dough and set it in a warm place to rise.

  3. Once very light, roll out the dough to 1 inch thick and cut into 4-inch square cakes.

  4. Spread the cakes out separately to dry in a cool place, turning them 5 or 6 times a day.

  5. When hard, store them in brown paper sacks.

Use the cakes

  1. To use, dissolve one cake in warm water, thicken with flour, cover, and let rise near the fire.

  2. Mix this with flour for bread, using one yeast cake for every 2 quarts of flour.

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 + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Corn + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together547 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  5. Hops + corntop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and bread barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,383 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

Yeast
Ferments the hop liquid and batter, producing gas that leavens the dough and bread.
Corn meal
Forms the stiff dough body and gives the cakes their grainy texture.
Flour
Supplies starch and structure for the thin batter and the dough, and feeds the yeast.
Fresh hops
Adds bitterness and aroma, and their compounds help preserve the starter.

The step that matters

Letting the dough rise until very light. Yeast needs time and warmth to produce enough carbon dioxide to leaven the dough. Rolling and cutting before it is very light leaves dense cakes that will not rise well later.

“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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