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Recipe for Home-made Yeast

A method for making yeast using hops, potatoes, sugar, and old yeast or yeast cake.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Recipe for Home-made Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hop tea and potatoes

  1. Brew a strong tea with the hops.

  2. Boil the potatoes until soft. Peel the boiled potatoes.

  3. Mash three of them. Pass the mashed potatoes through a fine sieve.

Make the starter

  1. Stir the hop tea into the mashed potatoes. Add the brown sugar and old yeast or yeast cake.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a strong stone jug. Cork the jug tightly.

Activate and store

  1. Place the jug near the fire to activate.

  2. Move the jug to a cool place to prevent souring.

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

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

  2. Hops + potatotop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Hops + sugartop 43% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Hops
Hop tea adds bitterness and aroma that help flavour the starter.
Irish potatoes
Mashed potato provides starch that feeds the yeast and gives the starter body.
Brown sugar
Provides sugar that the yeast consumes, helping it become active.
Old yeast or yeast cake
Supplies the live yeast cultures that ferment the starter.

The step that matters

Move the jug to a cool place to prevent souring. Once the yeast has become active, cooler storage slows fermentation so the mixture does not turn sour. Leaving it warm for too long lets bacteria outcompete the yeast, producing sour flavours.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Cucumberfits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, 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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