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Potato Yeast

A yeast starter made by boiling hops, grating potatoes, adding sugar, salt, ginger, and yeast, then allowing it to rise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Potato Yeast

Why it works: Potato and ginger work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 992 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Potato Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the hops in ½ gallon of water for one hour without tying them in a cloth.

  2. Peel and grate the potatoes into a two-gallon stone crock.

Make the starter

  1. Add sugar, salt, and ginger to the grated potatoes.

  2. Pour the boiling hop-water over the mixture while stirring continuously.

  3. When the mixture is milk-warm, add the yeast.

  4. Set the mixture in a warm place until it rises, then move it to 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.

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. Potato + gingertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together992 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Ginger + hopstop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  5. Potato + hopstop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide starch and bulk that the yeast feeds on and that form the body of the starter.
Sugar
Gives the yeast a quick food source so it becomes active and begins fermenting.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars produced from the potato starch, producing gas that makes the mixture rise.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma and help preserve the starter against spoilage bacteria.

The step that matters

Add the yeast only when the mixture is milk-warm. Yeast is killed by high heat, so adding it to hot liquid can stop fermentation. Milk-warm is cool enough to keep the yeast alive while still warm enough to encourage active growth.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger, hops. 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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