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Bread

Liquid Yeast

A liquid yeast mixture for bread made with boiling water, hops, mashed potatoes, sugar, salt, flour, and a yeast cake.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour 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 ↓

Liquid Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hop liquid

  1. Pour 1 pint of boiling water over the hops and steep for 10 minutes.

  2. Add the mashed potatoes, sugar, coarse sea salt, and flour to the liquid.

  3. Beat the mixture and add ½ gallon of boiling water.

Ferment and store

  1. When cool, add the yeast cake.

  2. Let rise for 24 hours, removing the foam several times.

  3. Bottle and keep in a cool place.

Use

  1. Use this liquid with an equal quantity of water when making bread.

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. Sugar + flourtop 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. Hops + potatotop 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

Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma, and helps preserve the liquid.
Mashed potatoes
Provide starch and body that feed the yeast.
Sugar
Provides food for the yeast so it becomes active and foams.
Flour
Adds starch that the yeast can break down, feeding fermentation.
Yeast cake
Starts the fermentation that makes the liquid rise and foam.

The step that matters

When cool, add the yeast cake. Yeast is killed by hot liquid, so the mixture must be cool enough to be safe for live yeast before it is added. Adding it while still hot can stop fermentation entirely.

Swap the potato

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

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

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