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Home-Made Yeast

A yeast starter made by fermenting grated potatoes with salt, sugar, yeast cake, hops, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Home-Made Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 100°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Cook the potatoes

  1. Grate the potatoes into a pot of boiling water.

  2. Cook in a double boiler for 10 minutes.

  3. Remove from heat and let cool to lukewarm (about 100°F).

Make the starter

  1. Add salt, sugar, and dissolved yeast cake.

  2. Let stand for 4 to 5 hours, stirring down each time it rises.

Store

  1. When settled, cover 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. Potato + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

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

  2. Potato + hopstop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Sugar + hopstop 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

Potatoes
Supply starch and moisture that the yeast can feed on.
Yeast cake
Ferments the sugars and produces gas that makes the starter rise.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds mild sweetness.
Hops
Adds bitter, aromatic notes to the starter.

The step that matters

Cool to lukewarm before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must cool to about 100°F before the dissolved yeast cake goes in. If it is too hot, the starter may not rise.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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.

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