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Potato Yeast

A yeast starter made by mashing boiled potatoes with water, salt, sugar, and old yeast, then allowing it to rise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Potato Yeast

Why it works: Potato and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Potato Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil a quarter peck of potatoes until tender.

  2. Mash the potatoes finely and thin with the water they were boiled in.

  3. Add coarse sea salt and brown sugar.

Make the starter

  1. Let the mixture cool to lukewarm, then stir in the old yeast.

  2. Cover the mixture and place it in a cool place to 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. Potato + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

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

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, so the starter thickens and feeds the yeast.
Old yeast
Supplies the living culture that ferments the sugars and makes the mixture rise.
Brown sugar
Gives the yeast an easily used food source to drive fermentation.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool to lukewarm before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by high heat, so adding it to a hot mixture can stop fermentation. Lukewarm liquid is warm enough to activate the yeast without harming it.

“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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