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Drink

Sweet Yeast

A sweet yeast beverage made from mashed potatoes, sugar, salt, flour, hops, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Sweet Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the potatoes in 2 quarts of water until done.

  2. Mash the potatoes and add sugar, salt, and flour.

  3. Boil the hops in the potato water until the strength is out, then strain into the jar with the other ingredients.

  4. Stir well and let cool.

  5. Add the yeast, let it rise, and store in a cool place.

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. Flour + hopstop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  5. Potato + hopstop 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 that feeds the yeast and adds body to the mixture.
Sugar
Gives the yeast a quick food source so it becomes active.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma while helping preserve the liquid.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing gas that makes the mixture rise.
Flour
Adds more starch for the yeast to work on and thickens the mash.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast after cooling. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the mixture must be cool enough before the yeast goes in. Adding it too early can stop fermentation entirely.

Swap the potato

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

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

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

More sweet yeast recipes

Bread 3Rolls 3

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