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Bread

Camp Yeast

A yeast starter made by boiling flour and water, adding sugar, yeast, and fermenting.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Camp Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Make a thin gruel with the spring water and flour, stirring and boiling for 20 minutes.

  2. Add the sugar when the mixture is warm, about the temperature of fresh milk.

  3. Stir in the fresh yeast, cover, and let it ferment in a warm place, removing the yeast as it rises.

  4. Keep a few spoonsful corked in a bottle for future 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).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the thin gruel that feeds the yeast and gives the starter its body.
Sugar
Provides food for the yeast, driving fermentation.
Fresh yeast
Acts as the living culture that ferments the mixture and raises it.

The step that matters

Add the sugar when the mixture is warm, about the temperature of fresh milk.. The mixture must be warm but not hot, since yeast is killed by excessive heat. Adding sugar at this temperature lets the yeast start fermenting quickly and safely.

“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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