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Yeast, Home-made

A homemade yeast made by boiling hops, cooling, mixing with salt, sugar, flour, and mashed potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour 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, Home-made

Oven, in the book's wordsA medium oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the liquid

  1. Boil hops in water for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the liquid and let it cool to the temperature of new milk.

  3. Add salt and sugar to the cooled liquid.

Make the yeast

  1. Beat flour with some of the liquid and mix everything well.

  2. Two days later, add the mashed potatoes.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + potatotop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Hops + flourtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  5. Hops + potatotop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Hops
Provide bitterness and aroma, and their natural wild yeasts help start fermentation.
Fine flour
Gives the mixture starch and body for the fermenting starter to feed on.
Moist sugar
Feeds the yeast organisms, helping fermentation get going.
Boiled and mashed potatoes
Add starch and moisture that feed the culture and keep the yeast active.

The step that matters

Cooling the liquid to the temperature of new milk. If the liquid is too hot, it can kill the yeast organisms before they start fermenting. Cooling it to lukewarm, around body temperature, keeps them alive and active so the starter can rise.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, sugar, flour. 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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