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Drink

Potato Beer

A fermented beverage made from grated potatoes, sugar, ginger, hops, and starter, left to brew for eight days.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 Beer

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mash

  1. Grate the potatoes and mix them with sugar and ginger.

  2. Pour boiling water over the mixture.

  3. Add hops.

Ferment

  1. Keep the mixture in a warm place for 8 days.

  2. Stir occasionally.

Finish the brew

  1. Mash 2 potatoes.

  2. Pour the water they were boiled in over the mashed potatoes.

  3. Add enough warm water to make 3 pints of liquid.

  4. Mix in salt and sugar.

  5. When cool, add 1 pint of the starter.

  6. Let the mixture stand overnight.

  7. Save 1 pint of the liquid as a starter for future use.

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 + 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
Supply starch that is turned into fermentable sugars, feeding the brew.
Sugar
Provides fermentable sugar that the culture converts, adding sweetness and body to the brew.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma and help keep the brew stable.
Starter
Carries a live culture from the previous batch to start fermentation.

The step that matters

When cool, add 1 pint of the starter. The starter contains a living culture that heat can kill. Letting the liquid cool to warm rather than hot before adding it keeps the culture active so fermentation can start.

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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