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Dry Yeast

A method for producing dry yeast by boiling hops, fermenting rye or barley flour, forming dough, drying, and rehydrating.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Rye and barley share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 66 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Dry Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Boil the grated hops and water together for 4 hours.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Add the rye meal or flour to the warm liquid.

  4. Wait until the temperature cools to room temperature.

  5. Add the yeast.

  6. Let the mixture ferment overnight.

Form and dry the dough

  1. Add the barley flour to form a dough.

  2. Cut the dough into thin disks.

  3. Dry the disks in the open air or sun as quickly as possible.

  4. Break the disks into small pieces.

Reactivate

  1. Soak the pieces overnight in warm water.

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. Rye + barleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together66 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Rye + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,320 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Barley + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together582 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  5. Hops + ryetop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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

What each ingredient does

Grated hops
Adds bitterness and aroma, and helps preserve the liquid during boiling.
Rye meal or flour
Provides starches and sugars that the yeast feeds on during fermentation.
Yeast
Ferments the mixture, producing gas that leavens the dough.
Barley flour
Forms the bulk of the dough, giving it structure once combined.

The step that matters

Let the liquid cool to room temperature before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed or slowed by high heat, so adding it to hot liquid can stop fermentation before the dough develops.

“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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