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Hop Yeast

A yeast made by boiling hops in water, mixing with mashed potatoes, flour, sugar, and salt, then fermenting.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour 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 1 pint of boiling water for 20 minutes.

Mix and rest

  1. Mix the potatoes, flour, sugar, and salt in a bowl.

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

  3. Add the 4½ quarts of boiling water and let it cool until blood-warm.

  4. Stir in the yeast and cover the bowl.

  5. Let it stand for 24 hours, stirring several times.

Bottle and store

  1. Transfer the yeast into 1 or 2 jugs and cork tightly.

  2. Store in a cool place; it will keep for 2 months.

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. Sugar + flourtop 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

Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma to the liquid and helps preserve it.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing gas that makes the liquid bubble and rise.
Hot mashed potatoes
Supplies starch that the yeast can feed on, adding body to the mixture.
Sugar
Provides food for the yeast, driving fermentation.
Flour
Adds starch and body, giving the yeast more material to work on.

The step that matters

Let it cool until blood-warm before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the water must cool to about body temperature before the yeast goes in. If it is still hot, fermentation may fail.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, 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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