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Bread

Hop Yeast

A fermented potato dough flavored with hops, ginger, and brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and ginger work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 992 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Hop Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Peel and slice the potatoes in cold water.

  2. Place the hops in a thin bag, tie securely, and boil in 3 quarts of water with the potatoes for 30 minutes.

Make the dough

  1. Remove the potatoes, mash them into a paste, and mix in the flour, ginger, salt, and brown sugar.

  2. Once cool, beat in the yeast or leaven.

  3. Cover and let rise in a warm place for 24 hours.

Store

  1. Transfer to airtight jars, but do not seal tightly until fermentation has stopped.

  2. Store jars 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 + gingertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together992 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 form the body of the paste.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma, and help preserve the bread.
Flour
Adds starch and structure to the paste as it binds with the potato.
Yeast or leaven
Ferments the sugars, producing gas that makes the mixture rise.
Brown sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and depth of flavour.

The step that matters

Leave the jars unsealed during fermentation. Fermentation produces carbon dioxide, which can build pressure and break a tightly sealed jar. Keeping lids loose until bubbling stops lets gas escape safely.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, flour, ginger, 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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