Name: Potato Vinegar
Ingredients: 2 gallons of water (from boiled potatoes); 1 pound brown sugar; 1 cup hop yeast

Why it works: Potato and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Potato Vinegar

Ingredients

2 gallons of water (from boiled potatoes)
1 pound brown sugar
1 cup hop yeast

Directions

Make the vinegar

Combine the water from boiled potatoes, brown sugar, and hop yeast in a large container.
Cover and let it sit for 3 to 4 weeks.

Use

Once fermented, use the vinegar to preserve fresh cucumbers without salt.

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.

Potato + sugartop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,032 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Brown sugar: Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into acetic acid precursors, giving the vinegar its base.
Hop yeast: Starts the fermentation that converts the sweet liquid into vinegar over several weeks.
Water from boiled potatoes: Serves as the liquid base in which the sugar ferments.

“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.