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Drink

Hop Yeast

A fermented beverage made from mashed potatoes, flour, salt, sugar, hops, yeast, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Hop Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hop water

  1. Boil the hops in a stew pan with 1 pint of boiling water for 20 minutes.

Make the mixture

  1. Mix the hot mashed potatoes, sugar, flour, and coarse sea salt in a bowl.

  2. Strain the hop water over the mixture and beat well.

  3. Add the 4 quarts of boiling water and let it stand until blood-warm.

  4. Stir in the yeast and cover the bowl.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Let it stand for 24 hours, skimming and stirring several times.

  2. Transfer to jugs and cork tightly, then 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. 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. Flour + hopstop 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

Hot mashed potatoes
Provide starch that feeds the yeast and adds body to the liquid.
Sugar
Provides food for the yeast, which turns it into carbonation and alcohol.
Flour
Adds starch and body to the mixture, giving the yeast more material to work on.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the mixture.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing carbon dioxide and alcohol that give the beer its fizz and strength.

The step that matters

Let the liquid cool to blood-warm before adding yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must be cooled to about body temperature before the yeast goes in. Too hot and fermentation will fail; too cold and it will be slow.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, hops, 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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