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Potato Yeast

A yeast dough made with boiled potatoes, hops, flour, sugar, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Potato Yeast

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 ↓

Potato Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the potatoes in enough water to cover them until tender.

  2. In a separate pot, boil the hops in 1 quart of water.

  3. Strain the hop water over 2 quarts of flour and 1 cup of sugar. Stir the mixture together.

Make the dough

  1. Mash the boiled potatoes through a colander into the hop water mixture.

  2. Allow the mixture to cool.

  3. Add 1 cup of yeast and let it rise.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  5. 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
Add starch and moisture, giving the bread a soft, tender crumb.
Hops
Add bitter and aromatic compounds that flavor the dough and help preserve it.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the bread its structure.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a touch of sweetness and browning.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide gas that makes the dough rise.

The step that matters

Allow the mixture to cool before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the mixture must be cool enough that it will not destroy the yeast before the dough rises.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, flour, 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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