Why it works: Potato and molasses work together. They rank in the top 31% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 197 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓
Artificial Yeast
Ingredients
Directions
Boil the potatoes until soft and beginning to break.
Mash the potatoes into a thin paste with boiling water.
Mix in the molasses and yeast thoroughly over low heat if the weather is cold.
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.
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Potato + molassestop 31% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together197 recipes
Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Potatoes
- Provide starch that the yeast can work on, forming the bulk of the mixture.
- Molasses
- Supplies sugar that yeast consumes, feeding its fermentation.
- Yeast
- Ferments the sugars in the mixture, producing the leavening action.
The step that matters
Mixing in the yeast over low heat in cold weather. Yeast is a living culture that grows best at moderate warmth and is weakened by excessive heat. Heating gently keeps the mixture warm enough for fermentation to start without killing the yeast, and thorough mixing spreads the cells evenly through the paste.
“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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