Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓
Yeast for Home-made Bread
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Boil the flour, sugar, and salt in 2 gallons of water for one hour.
Allow the mixture to cool nearly to room temperature.
Bottle and rest
Bottle and cork it tightly.
It will be ready to use in twenty-four hours.
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.
-
Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Flour
- Supplies starch that the yeast and microbes break down and feed on during fermentation.
- Sugar
- Serves as the readily available food that yeast consumes, producing gas and flavor as it ferments.
The step that matters
Allow the mixture to cool nearly to room temperature.. Heat kills living yeast and microbes. Cooling the boiled mixture until it is nearly room temperature before bottling keeps it warm enough to ferment but not hot enough to destroy the organisms that drive the fermentation.
“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.
You might also like
Tomato Soup526 recipes
Brown Bread461 recipes
Mutton Broth292 recipes
Yorkshire Pudding264 recipesThe free Flavor Lab newsletter: one surprising pairing a week and the molecular reason it works, in 60 seconds. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Prefer an account? Create a free account to save pairings and unlock the full chemistry.