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Artificial Yeast

A fermented mixture of mashed potatoes, molasses, and home-brewed yeast used as an artificial yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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

Prepare

  1. Boil the potatoes until they are soft and beginning to break apart.

  2. Mash the potatoes into a thin paste, adding boiling water as needed.

Ferment

  1. Mix in the molasses and yeast thoroughly over low heat if the weather is cold.

  2. Allow the mixture to ferment until it bubbles and is ready for use.

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 + molassestop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked 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 and bulk that the yeast can work on as a food source.
Molasses
Supplies sugars that the yeast ferments, driving bubbling and rising activity.
Yeast
Converts the sugars into carbon dioxide and alcohol, causing the mixture to ferment.

The step that matters

Mixing in the yeast over low heat in cold weather. Yeast activity slows in cold conditions, so gentle warmth helps it start fermenting. Heat that is too high, however, can kill yeast cells, so the mixture should stay warm rather than hot.

“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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