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 ↓
To Make Yeast
Ingredients
Directions
Make the yeast
Thicken 2 quarts of water with 3 tablespoons of flour and boil for 30 minutes.
Sweeten with ½ pound of brown sugar.
When near cold, add 4 tablespoons of fresh yeast to a jug and shake well.
Ferment and store
Let it stand for one day to ferment near the fire, uncovered.
Pour off the thin liquor on top, shake the remainder, and cork it for use.
Always reserve 4 tablespoons of the old yeast to ferment the next batch.
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.
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Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Fresh yeast
- Provides the microbes that ferment the sugars and leaven the next batch.
- Brown sugar
- Feeds the yeast during fermentation and adds a molasses sweetness.
- All-purpose flour
- Thickens the water so the liquid becomes a body that the yeast can cling to.
The step that matters
Adding the yeast when the liquid is only near cold. Yeast cells are killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must be cool enough to be safe before the yeast is added. Adding it too hot can stop fermentation entirely.
“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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