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Home Made Yeast

A homemade yeast culture made by boiling hops, potatoes, and salt in water, then adding yeast and raising the mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Hops and potato work together. They rank in the top 39% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3 recipes. Both carry myrcene, which smells balsamic, herbaceous. The science ↓

Home Made Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Boil the hops in the water for 10 minutes.

  2. Grate the potatoes and stir them into the hot water after straining the hops.

  3. Add the salt and boil again.

Add the yeast and keep it

  1. Once cool, add the yeast and mix well.

  2. Raise the mixture over the fire in a pan, then keep it in the cellar covered with a board.

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. Hops + potatotop 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

Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma, and helps slow spoilage in the mixture.
Potatoes
Supply starch that the yeast can ferment into sugars and gas.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing carbon dioxide that makes the mixture rise.

The step that matters

Add the yeast once cool. Yeast is killed by high heat, so adding it to hot liquid can stop fermentation. Waiting for the mixture to cool keeps the yeast alive to work.

“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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