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Jug Yeast

A yeast starter made by boiling potatoes with hops, flour, and yeast, then cooling and storing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,355 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Jug Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Peel and boil the potatoes in ½ gallon of water.

  2. Add the hops tied in a cloth and boil together.

  3. Scald ⅓ cup of flour and mash the potatoes, then mix them together.

  4. When the mixture is cool enough, add ⅓ cup of yeast.

  5. Once light, transfer to a jug and store in a cool place.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Hops + flourtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  3. 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

Potatoes
Provide starch and body, and their mash thickens the mixture for the yeast to feed on.
Flour
Scalded flour adds starch that gives the yeast food and helps thicken the starter.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars and starches in the mixture, causing it to become light and bubbly.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma, and help preserve the starter.

The step that matters

When the mixture is cool enough, add the yeast. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the mixture must be cooled before adding it. Adding yeast too early can destroy it and stop the starter from rising.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, flour. 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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