Skip to main content
Bread

Hop Yeast

A yeast mixture made with potatoes, hops, water, flour, and hop yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Potato and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,355 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Hop Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes and hops

  1. Peel and chop the potatoes.

  2. Place the hops in a bag and add them to 2 quarts of water in a pot. Boil the water with the bag of hops, ensuring it stays submerged.

Make the yeast mixture

  1. Once the potatoes are cooked, add a little flour to the yeast dish.

  2. Pour the boiling hop-water over the flour.

  3. Mash the potatoes until smooth.

  4. Once the mixture cools, add a little hop yeast.

  5. Keep the mixture warm until it rises, then store it in a cool place.

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. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  3. Potato + hopstop 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

Potatoes
Break down into a smooth starchy mass that thickens the mixture and feeds the yeast.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma to the water, and help preserve the liquid.
Flour
Provides starch that the yeast can feed on, adding body to the mixture.
Hop yeast
Ferments the sugars in the mixture, causing it to rise and become leavened.

The step that matters

Adding the hop yeast after the mixture cools. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the mixture must cool enough that it is no longer hot before the yeast is added. Adding it too early can stop fermentation entirely.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, 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.

More hop yeast recipes

Starter 9Bread 8 See all 46 →

You might also like

Potato BreadPotato Bread124 recipesCornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipes