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Hop Yeast

A yeast starter made by boiling hops, mixing with grated potatoes, flour, salt, sugar, ginger, and yeast, then fermenting.

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 the hop water

  1. Tie the hops in a coarse muslin bag.

  2. Boil the bagged hops in 2 quarts of water.

Make the starter

  1. Grate the potatoes.

  2. Pour 1 quart of the boiling hop water over the grated potatoes to form a starch.

  3. Add the flour, salt, sugar, and ginger. Stir thoroughly.

  4. Set aside until lukewarm.

  5. Add 3 tablespoons of good yeast.

  6. Set the mixture in a warm place to rise for 3 to 4 hours until light and spongy.

  7. Transfer the mixture to a corked airtight jug. Keep 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 provides the body and food for the yeast to work on.
Hops
Hop water adds bitterness and aroma and helps preserve the starter.
Yeast
Yeast ferments the sugars and starch, producing gas that makes the mixture rise and turn spongy.
Flour
Flour thickens the mixture and adds more starch for the yeast to feed on.

The step that matters

Set the mixture in a warm place to rise. Yeast works best at warm temperatures, and the mixture needs time to ferment and become light and spongy before it is stored. Stopping early leaves the starter weak.

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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