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A Good Reliable Yeast

A yeast starter made with hops, potatoes, flour, salt, sugar, 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 ↓

A Good Reliable Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hops

  1. Steep the hops in a porcelain or bright tin kettle.

Make the starter

  1. Boil the sliced potatoes in 2 quarts of water until very soft, then mash until smooth and creamy.

  2. Wet the flour to a smooth paste, then pour in the boiling hot potato water while stirring.

  3. Boil the mixture for a few minutes, stirring continuously.

  4. Add the hop water, mashed potatoes, salt, and sugar; stir thoroughly and let cool.

  5. When warm, stir in the yeast and let it rise in a warm place for 12 hours.

Store

  1. Transfer to a well‑cleaned and scalded air‑tight vessel and store in the cellar.

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. 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

Potatoes
Provide starch and body that thicken the mixture and feed the yeast.
Flour
Forms the paste that thickens the starter and gives it body.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing gas that makes the starter rise and become active.
Sugar
Provides readily fermentable sugar that fuels the yeast.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma and helps preserve the starter.

The step that matters

Let the yeast rise after stirring it in when warm. Yeast is killed by excessive heat, so the mixture must be cool enough to add it safely. Stirring it in while still hot can destroy the yeast and stop the starter from rising.

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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