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Good Home-made Yeast

A homemade yeast starter made from grated potatoes, hops, sugar, salt, and fresh yeast.

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 ↓

Good Home-made Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grate the potatoes.

  2. Boil the hops in water, then strain the hot liquid over the grated potatoes, stirring well to prevent thickening.

  3. Add sugar and salt to the mixture.

Ferment and store

  1. Let the mixture cool, then add fresh yeast.

  2. Allow it to stand until a thick foam rises on top.

  3. Bottle the yeast after a couple of days 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. 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

Potatoes
Provide starch that bulks out the mixture and feeds the yeast as it ferments.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma while helping to preserve the liquid.
Sugar
Gives the yeast readily available food so it becomes active and produces foam.
Fresh yeast
Starts the fermentation that causes the mixture to foam and rise.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding yeast. Yeast is killed or slowed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must be cool enough that the yeast stays alive and can ferment. Stirring the hot liquid over the potatoes also keeps the starch from clumping into a thick mass.

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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