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Yeast

A yeast starter made from potatoes, flour, sugar, and water.

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

Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Start the yeast

  1. Dissolve salt in warm water.

  2. Add fresh or compressed yeast and let it rise for 5-6 hours.

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil and wash the potatoes, then drain and refill with fresh water.

  2. Mash the potatoes with flour and the potato water.

Make and strain the starter

  1. Mix in brown sugar and enough iced water to achieve a cream-like consistency.

  2. Strain the mixture into a clean jar using a wire sieve.

  3. When warm, mix in 1 quart of fresh yeast to start fermentation.

Ferment

  1. Keep in a warm place for 12-24 hours until ready to use.

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

Flour
Forms the starch base that thickens the mashed potato mixture into a starter.
Potatoes
Add starch and moisture, giving the starter body and a soft texture.
Yeast
Ferments the mixture, producing gas that leavens and gives the starter its activity.
Brown sugar
Provides food for the yeast and adds sweetness and flavour to the starter.

The step that matters

Mix in the yeast only when the mixture is warm, not hot. Yeast grows best at moderate warmth. If the mixture is too hot, the heat can kill the yeast cells, so fermentation will not start properly.

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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