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How to Make Good Yeast

A method for producing yeast using potatoes, hops, flour, and yeast starter.

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 ↓

How to Make Good Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potato mixture

  1. Peel the potatoes and place them in a pot with the water.

  2. Tie the hops in a bag and add to the pot.

  3. Boil until the potatoes are soft enough to mash.

  4. Remove the hops and mash the potatoes through a colander.

  5. Mix the mashed potatoes with the flour in a large dish.

  6. Pour the boiling water over the mixture and stir well.

  7. Let the mixture cool until it is lukewarm.

Ferment and store

  1. Add the yeast and stir again, then cover and let sit overnight.

  2. In the morning, add the sugar, salt, and ginger.

  3. Transfer the mixture to a 2-gallon jug.

  4. Use 1 cup of this yeast for baking 5 or 6 loaves.

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
Starch that thickens the mixture and provides food for the yeast to ferment.
Flour
Adds starch and body, helping the mixture thicken into a loose batter.
Baker's yeast
Ferments the sugars and produces gas that makes the mixture active and bubbly.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast so it ferments and produces gas more quickly.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma and helps preserve the mixture.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool until it is lukewarm. Boiling water would kill the yeast, so the mixture must be cool enough to be safe for yeast before it is added.

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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