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Good Yeast

A yeast starter made from mashed potatoes, flour, salt, sugar, water, 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 ↓

Good Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. In a large bowl, combine the mashed potatoes, flour, coarse sea salt, and sugar.

  2. Pour in the boiling water while stirring carefully to dissolve the mixture.

  3. Add the cold water and stir until well combined.

  4. Strain the mixture and let it cool.

Rise and store

  1. Once cool, add the yeast and set it in a warm place to rise.

  2. When it is light, transfer it to a jug or bottle and cork it tightly.

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).

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

What each ingredient does

Mashed potatoes
Provide starch that feeds the yeast and gives the starter body.
Flour
Adds starch that the yeast can break down into sugars for fermentation.
Sugar
Gives the yeast a quick food source to speed up fermentation.
Yeast
Ferments the starch and sugars, producing gas that makes the starter rise.

The step that matters

Add the yeast only after the mixture has cooled. Yeast is killed by high heat, so adding it to the hot mixture can stop fermentation before it begins. Cooling first keeps the yeast alive to raise the starter.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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