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Hop Yeast

A fermented potato mash with hops, yeast, sugar, salt, and ginger, boiled then left to bubble.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Hop Yeast

Oven, in the book's wordsA rather hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Boil the potatoes in a gallon of water with the hops tied in a bag.

  2. Once the potatoes are done, pour the water over ½ cup of flour in a large jar.

  3. Mash the potatoes and add them to the jar when the mixture is lukewarm.

Ferment

  1. Add 1 cup of yeast, ½ cup of sugar, ¼ cup of coarse sea salt, and 1 tablespoon of ginger.

  2. Mix thoroughly and let it sit until bubbly.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma to the liquid while the potatoes boil.
Flour
Thickens the potato water into a starch base that feeds the fermentation.
Yeast
Converts sugars into carbon dioxide, making the mixture rise and turn bubbly.
Sugar
Provides food for the yeast, driving fermentation and carbon dioxide production.
Potatoes
Supply starch and body to the liquid, adding texture and nutrients for the yeast.

The step that matters

Adding the mashed potatoes to the lukewarm mixture. If the mixture is too hot, it can kill the yeast before fermentation begins. Waiting until it is lukewarm keeps the yeast alive so it can start working.

Swap the potato

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

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

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