Skip to main content
Bread

Dry Yeast

A yeast-leavened bread batter made with hops, potatoes, flour, cornmeal, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Potato and corn match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 938 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Dry Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hop and potato liquid

  1. Steep 1 cup of fresh hops in 6 cups of boiling water for 15 minutes.

  2. Strain the hop infusion and return the strained liquid to the kettle.

  3. Cook the liquid with 6 medium-sized potatoes until the potatoes are done.

  4. Mash the cooked potatoes into a gallon crock.

Make the sponge

  1. Add 1 cup of flour to the mashed potatoes.

  2. Pour the boiling hop and potato water over the mixture.

  3. Beat the mixture well until it cools.

  4. Add 1 cup of dry yeast (well soaked) or 2 cakes of yeast foam.

  5. Add ½ cup of sugar to the mixture.

  6. Add 1 tablespoon of salt to the mixture.

  7. Set the mixture in a warm place to rise, stirring down each time it is light, until evening.

Batter and rest

  1. Add ½ cup of salt and enough white cornmeal to make a batter as thick as for corn bread.

  2. Let the batter set until the next noon.

  3. Stir in enough meal to make coarse rivels.

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 + corntop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together938 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Corn + gingertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together412 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Potato + gingertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together992 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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

Potatoes
Starch and body that give the bread a moist, tender crumb.
Yeast
Produces gas as it ferments, which makes the dough rise.
Fresh hops
Add bitterness and aroma, and help preserve the liquid.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast, speeding fermentation and adding a little sweetness.
Flour
Adds starch and structure that thickens the mixture and supports the rise.
White cornmeal
Adds a coarse, grainy texture to the batter.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture well until it cools.. Very hot liquid kills yeast. The mixture must be cool enough before the yeast is added so that it can ferment and make the dough rise.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (hops, potato, flour, sugar, corn, bread):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Gingerthe original
  4. Turmericfits about as well

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

You might also like

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesPotato BreadPotato Bread124 recipesNut BreadNut Bread109 recipes