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A yeast starter made with potatoes, hops, flour, sugar, salt, and yeast.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Boil the potatoes and hops in water until the potatoes are done.

  2. Remove the potatoes, mash them, and run them through a colander.

  3. Return the mashed potatoes to the hop water and stir until it boils.

  4. Pour the mixture over the flour, add sugar and salt, and stir until combined.

Add yeast and store

  1. Let it cool, then add the yeast and mix well.

  2. Allow it to stand until blended and fermentation stops.

  3. Transfer to a jug and seal tightly; store in 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.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Hops + flourtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide starch that thickens the mixture and feeds the yeast.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma, and help preserve the starter.
Flour
Adds body and starch for the yeast to ferment.
Sugar
Gives the yeast a quick food source to drive fermentation.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars and starches, producing carbon dioxide and flavor.

The step that matters

Let it cool before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed or weakened by very hot liquid, so the mixture must cool before the yeast is stirred in to keep fermentation active.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Potatothe original

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