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Bread

Hop Yeast

A potato-based bread with hops, yeast, sugar, salt, and ginger.

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

Make the starter

  1. Boil the potatoes in a gallon of water with the hops tied in a bag.

  2. In a jar, add ½ cup of flour.

  3. Once the potatoes are done, pour the water over the flour and add the mashed potatoes.

Add the yeast and flavourings

  1. When the mixture is lukewarm, add 1 cup of yeast.

  2. When the mixture is cold, stir in ½ cup of sugar, ¼ cup of coarse sea salt, and 1 tablespoon of ginger.

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
Mashed potatoes add starch and body, helping the mixture thicken and hold moisture.
Flour
Provides starch that the yeast feeds on, forming the base of the starter.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the mixture, producing gas that makes the bread rise.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness to the finished bread.
Hops
Adds bitter, aromatic flavour and mild preservative character to the liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast at the right temperature. Yeast is killed by high heat, so adding it to a mixture that is still hot can stop fermentation. Waiting until the mixture is lukewarm, as the record directs, keeps the yeast alive so it can leaven the dough.

Swap the potato

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

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

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