Skip to main content
Dessert

Potato Yeast

A fermented potato dough made by boiling, mashing, adding water, molasses, and yeast, then letting it rise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Potato Yeast

Why it works: Potato and molasses work together. They rank in the top 31% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 197 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Potato Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the potatoes until soft and mash them.

  2. Add enough water to achieve a consistency similar to common yeast.

  3. While the potatoes are warm, mix in the molasses and yeast.

  4. Let the mixture stand near a warm place until it has finished fermenting.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + molassestop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together197 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide starch that becomes the bulk of the dough and feeds the fermentation.
Molasses
Supplies sugars that yeast consumes, driving fermentation and adding a deep, sweet flavor.
Yeast
Ferments sugars into carbon dioxide and alcohol, which makes the dough rise and gives it flavor.

The step that matters

Mixing the molasses and yeast while the potatoes are warm. Yeast is sensitive to heat; very hot potatoes can kill it, while cooler mixtures ferment slowly. Warm, not scalding, potatoes let the yeast start working without being destroyed.

“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.

You might also like

Deep-Fried Potato BallsDeep-Fried Potato Balls119 recipesMolasses CookiesMolasses Cookies96 recipesMolasses CakeMolasses Cake90 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipes