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Dessert

Making Dry Yeast

A method for producing dry yeast cakes using hops, potatoes, and fresh yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and corn match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 938 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Making Dry Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Boil the hops in a pailful of water for one hour.

  2. Boil the potatoes until soft, then mash them fine.

  3. Strain the water from the hops onto the mashed potatoes.

  4. Add the salt and stir in enough flour to make a thin batter.

  5. Let the mixture cool until it is comfortable to touch.

  6. Stir in the fresh yeast and set aside to rise for six to eight hours until frothy.

  7. Stir in enough sifted corn meal until thick enough to roll out.

Dry and store

  1. Roll out the mixture to about ¼ inch thick and cut into squares (about four inches).

  2. Lay the squares in a sunny spot to dry, turning them twice a day until completely dry.

  3. Pack the dried cakes away for storage.

Use the yeast

  1. To use, dissolve one cake in ½ pint lukewarm water, add sugar and salt, and stir in enough flour to make a thin batter.

  2. Set the mixture in a warm place until it rises.

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 + corntop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together938 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Hops
Adds bitter and aromatic flavour and natural compounds that help the starter rise.
Potatoes
Provide starch and moisture that feed the yeast and give the cakes body.
Fresh yeast
Ferments the sugars in the starter, producing gas that makes it rise and turn frothy.
Flour
Forms the batter structure that traps the gas produced by the yeast.
Corn meal
Stiffens the mixture so it can be rolled out and dried into cakes.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool until it is comfortable to touch. Yeast is killed by high heat, so adding it to a hot mixture can stop fermentation. Cooling to lukewarm lets the yeast stay alive and rise the batter.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, flour, corn, 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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