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Hop Yeast

A potato dish boiled with hops, sugar, salt, and yeast, then cooled and stirred.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Hop Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and slice the potatoes.

  2. Tie the hops in a cloth and boil them with the potatoes in a bright tin or porcelain pot.

  3. Strain the mixture through a colander, washing the hop bag in the water.

Finish the brew

  1. Add enough cold water to make a total of 1 gallon.

  2. When cool, stir in the sugar, salt, and old yeast.

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 + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

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

  2. Potato + hopstop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Hops + sugartop 43% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Hops
Add bitterness and aroma, and help preserve the liquid.
Sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Old yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide for the brew.
Potatoes
Supply starch and body to the liquid.

The step that matters

When cool, stir in the yeast. Adding yeast to hot liquid can kill it. Letting the mixture cool first keeps the yeast alive so it can ferment the sugar.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Cucumberfits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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