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To Make Baker's Yeast

A yeast starter made by mixing flour, water, sugar, and yeast, fermenting, then filtering the liquid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar 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 ↓

To Make Baker's Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Make a smooth batter with 3 tablespoons of flour and a little cold water.

  2. Add nearly 2 quarts of water and ¼ pound of brown sugar.

  3. Heat the mixture over the fire, stirring occasionally, then let it cool until lukewarm.

Ferment and store

  1. Add 2 tablespoons of good yeast and set it in a warm place for a day to ferment.

  2. Pour off the thin liquid from the top, shake the remainder, and store it in a bottle or covered stone jar.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the initial batter, giving the yeast a starchy base to work in.
Brown sugar
Provides sugar that yeast ferments into carbon dioxide and alcohol, driving the culture.
Yeast
Supplies the living cultures that ferment the sweetened liquid and make the starter active.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool until lukewarm before adding the yeast. Yeast is a living organism. Very hot liquid can kill it, so the mixture must cool to lukewarm before the yeast goes in, or fermentation will fail.

“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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